


the open road and other anesthetics

by tactfulGnostalgic



Series: the family brooklyn [4]
Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Multi, Post-Canon, Road Trips, Stand Alone, soft family bonding ft. an extravagant degree of americanah, spider-fam shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:07:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 28,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26013097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tactfulGnostalgic/pseuds/tactfulGnostalgic
Summary: Six superheroes and a mint green Volkswagen van take a road trip through the dusty heart of America. Featuring: motels, cornfields, diners, bad music, good music, and the elaborate host of personal issues that comes with being a teenage vigilante.(Stand-alone fic in the family brooklyn 'verse.)
Relationships: Miles Morales & Gwen Stacy, Miles Morales & Peni Parker & Peter B. Parker & Peter Benjamin Parker & Peter Porker & Gwen Stacy
Series: the family brooklyn [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1269617
Comments: 67
Kudos: 276





	1. disc one

The car has clearly seen better days. When those days happened is debatable, but Miles would put money on the Jurassic Period.

It's a mint green Toyota van, box-shaped, with a flat grill and a crack bisecting the windshield. Dents pepper the exterior. The paint peels in some places, changes colors where it had been hastily retouched in others, and the left tail light is so thoroughly damaged that it’s hard to see whether or not the bulb actually works. Its owner had either never been introduced to the concept of a car wash, or simply never cared. It’s kind of like the Mystery Van, if Alan Moore wrote  _Scooby-Doo._

While he’s standing there, staring aghast from the living room window, the van honks. With a grumble, he tugs his suitcase into the foyer. “Bye, Mom,” he calls. From upstairs comes the response:

“¡Buenos días, mijo! Dile a Gwen que dije hola.”

“Okay! ¡Te veo en una semana! ¡Chao!”

He jogs down to the curb. The van stalls while he hauls his suitcase into the back, and then climbs into the shotgun seat. The upholstery is faded grey and soft with age, and the stereo has an honest-to-God cassette slot. Immediately, he starts poking around for an aux.

“Your car smells like my grandma’s attic,” he complains.

“Seatbelt,” Peter orders. His stubble is gone, as are the worst of the dark circles around his eyes, although grey still clings to his temples. It’s a marginal upgrade from ‘creepy uncle’ to ‘middle school soccer coach,’ but it’s definite upward movement. He’s wearing a ratty t-shirt that reads  _I Can’t Believe It’s Not Batman!_ under a picture of Tony Stark.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Hello, Miles,” says a deep, throaty baritone. 

“Heya, kiddo.”

“Hi, Miles!”

“Hey, guys,” Miles says, and twists around to greet them. Peni is sprawled comfortably over the backseat, texting with one hand and waving hello with the other, while Noir and Ham peer out from the far back row. “Where’s Gwen?”

“We’ve still got to pick her up.” Peter starts the car, which bucks and growls at the imposition, and then shudders forward with a distinctly resentful whine. Miles eyes the gearshift as though it has personally offended him.

“Where did you find this piece of junk?”

“Excuse me, this is a great car.”

“It seems perfectly sound to me,” pipes up Noir.

“Listen, man, no shade, but seat belts haven’t been invented in your dimension yet. You don’t really get a vote in the safety debate.”

“I drive a giant battle mech with a spider for a co-pilot,” Peni says tonelessly, still texting. “Trust me, this is fine.”

Miles can’t really say anything to that, but he does flop back in his seat and wince as Peter narrowly sweeps past the row of parked cars to his right. “Why are you driving?” he adds. “Your license isn’t even valid in this dimension.”

“Elementary, Watson,” sings Peter, swerving through an intersection on the last few milliseconds of a yellow light and careening down a side street. “You and Gwen are basically fetal, Peni’s idea of a car involves a hyperspace drive and three gearshifts, Noir’s never gotten behind the wheel of anything made after 1933, and Ham is a talking pig. So yeah, me and my technically-invalid New York state driver’s license are going to take point on this one.”

“Fair enough,” Miles concedes, and finds the aux buried in a devilish-looking tangle of cords and oddly shaped glowing battery boxes in the glove compartment. “Um . . . Peni . . . ?”

“Don’t touch that,” she says immediately, and Miles hauls his hands off so fast they hit the roof. She drops her phone and clambers up between the front seats. “That’s the dimensional warper. It’s very delicately calibrated.”

“Oh, okay.”

“That right there,” she says, pointing at one of the blinking yellow bulbs, “is what let us come get you. It’s an inter-dimensional tracker.” She beams proudly. “Super hard to engineer, almost impossible to set up. I had to get a permit from the Global Council of Quantum Mechanical Ethics just to build a prototype.”

“Is that something that exists in the future, or just in your universe?”

“How should I know?” She shrugs. “You should get one going in your universe if you don’t have one already, though. Based on where you are right now in terms of tech, quantum mechanics is going to become a pretty hot button issue in a couple decades.” She pauses. “Or, alternatively, it won’t.”

“What do you mean?”

But she’s already retreating to the backseat, popping one headphone in. “The aux should still work,” she calls over the sound of her own music. “Just plug in whatever you’ve got.”

“Are there any adaptors for a Samsung?”

“I’m an engineer, Miles, not a wizard.”

The van trundles into an alley, climbing inelegantly over the sidewalk and rattling with the effort, and Peter pulls them to a halt. “Okay,” he says. “Miles, push the green button twice, then the blue.”

“What is that gonna do?” Miles asks.

“Send us to Gwen’s dimension,” Peni supplies. “Hopefully.”

“Hopefully? What do you mean, hopefully?”

“Listen,” she says, which is not an answer and frankly is barely even pretending to be. “In ninety-nine of one hundred trial runs, this worked.”

“What happened in the other one?”

“That’s what I said! Wish I could have asked them.”

Heaving a sigh, Peter leans over and jabs the three buttons himself. The engine gives a load, load, creaking, and then with a hiss, a wave of familiar colors starts to bubble up over the hood of the car.

“Peni?” Miles pulls back from the nest of gnarled wires. “Peni, what do you think happened in the other one?”

The colors crawl closer to the windshield, washing up against the glass. The car rattles furiously.

“Don’t worry! If you were going to have an adverse reaction to quantum radiation, it would already have killed you,” Peni assures him, straining to be heard over the scream of the engine, and then the colors swallow the car whole.

It feels like he’s being sieved through a grate the size of a pinhead. There’s no other way to describe it. The air around him twists and then flattens, seeming to constrict around him and press him into impossibly small contortions, twisting, stretching, and drawing him out like a rubber cord. Just as he’s struggling to draw breath, the world flexes and then bounces back to its normal shape. The van seems to drop in free-fall for a moment before it lands with a shudder in the middle of an alley almost identical to the one it had been in before.

It takes a lot of effort for Miles to pry his fingers off the door handle. Everyone else seems insanely unruffled by this process; Peter, with businesslike matter-of-factness, reaches down to start the engine. Noir dusts off the shoulder of his trench coat. Ham stretches, as though standing up after a good massage.

“Sorry,” Peni says. “I forgot you hadn’t warped before.”

“It’s fine,” Miles says weakly.

“It’s always a little distressing the first time. If that helps.”

“It doesn’t, but thank you.”

The last of the colors dissipate over the hood, and Peter revs the engine. “Let her know we’re five minutes away,” he tells Peni.

“Already on it.”

Miles turns on his phone. “Do you get service in other dimensions?” He lifts his phone up and rotates it around, seeking a signal. 

“No, I just hooked up a wifi router to the dimension-hopper. I thought it might come in handy.”

“You’re the best.”

“I know.”

* * *

Gwen’s sitting on the curb when they arrive, a duffel bag slung over her shoulder and her headphones in. The silver bar through her right eyebrow is complemented by the studs along the shell of her ear, and she wears a green hoodie over a raggedy pair of jean shorts. It takes Miles a moment to recognize her, and another to realize why: without the Visions uniform or the spider suit, without a mean glare or incoming uppercut, she looks much, much younger.

He rolls down the window as Peter pulls over and raps on the side of the door. “Oh, God,” she says, horror dawning on her face. “We’re going in that?”

“Why do people keep acting like there’s something wrong with my car, there’s nothing wrong with my car!”

“I’ve made peace with it,” Miles informs her.

“I’ve changed my mind. I’m staying home.” She swings her duffel into the back.

“I don’t see anyone else offering their cars,” Peter says pointedly. “Almost like none of you have one. And don’t get to criticize mine.”

“I offered for us to take my mech!”

“Someone explain to Peni why we’re not rolling down I-90 in a Gundam.”

“Seriously,” says Miles, twisting to grab a selfie of the backseat. Gwen flashes a peace sign and bleps her tongue. “You get merch royalties like the rest of us, how can you not afford a new Honda?”

“Your car is very nice, Peter,” Noir says kindly.

“Thank you! See? That’s why he’s my favorite.”

“Noir comes from a universe where there aren’t any seat belts,” Gwen points out, shutting the door behind her. “How would he know?”

“That’s what I said,” Miles exclaims.

“This was a bad idea,” Peter says distantly. “Why did I think this was a good idea? This is a bad idea.”

“You said it would be a fun team-building exercise,” Noir supplies. “And you don’t have any friends in your own dimension besides your ex-wife.”

“I told you that  _in confidence!”_

“Really?” Miles turns to regard him sympathetically. “That’s kind of sad.”

“Yeah, Peter,” Gwen echoes. “That’s really kind of sad.”

“It’s nice that you consider us your friends, though,” Peni says.

“I don’t.”

“We love you, too, Peter,” Ham says, although his tone makes it hard to tell if he’s joking or not.

“You are like a brother to me,” Noir vows.

“Never mind. We’re not friends.”

“Yes we are,” Miles croons. “You love us.”

“You think we’re a team,” teases Gwen. “You’re just a big softie, huh?”

“You like us so much you wanted to go on vacation with us.”

“Mr. Parker, can I ask: how does it feel to have three teenagers and a pig be among your only friends? Inquiring minds want to know.”

“Mr. Parker, Mr. Parker, excuse me? Sources say that you may have genuine emotional investment in the lives of no less than five other individuals, can you confirm or deny these allegations?”

“I don’t like any of you people,” Peter says doggedly, as the van starts to weave through traffic.

* * *

“We should go on a road trip,” Peter had said, apropos of nothing, in a rare moment of silence on the Spider-Person video call. Miles’ pen had paused on the page, and then he sat back, waiting for someone to reply.

Another moment of silence followed it. Then:

Peni tilted her head. “When were you thinking?”

“I dunno. I’m free most of the time these days, but spring break would probably work best for you guys . . . ?”

“So for a week, then?”

“Yeah. Head out into the midwest, see some cornfields. Eat terrible food. Sleep in run-down motels. You know.” He scratched the back of his neck. “I mean, that was the fun thing to do when I was a kid, anyway. You might not want—”

“That sounds nice,” Noir said.

“I haven’t had a vacation in ages,” Ham added.

“That sounds really cool,” Peni agreed.

“Awesome,” said Peter, clearly glad and trying not to sound like it. “Miles? Gwen?”

Miles twirled his pen between his fingers.

Going meant several things. It meant dropping any schoolwork he might have done over the break, which could possibly put him behind on his homework load. It meant spending the break away from his parents, which would be an especially hard sell after the events of last September. And it would mean leaving the city without Spider-Man for a week.

With things stacked up like that, it wasn’t a good idea. But on the other hand: Miles was tired.

He was exhausted. He was out every day doing schoolwork and keeping up appearances, and every night he was — well. The obvious. He was getting five hours of sleep a night, on good nights. Three on the bad ones. He had bruises from a fight with the Lizard that still hadn’t healed, the Kingpin was getting out of jail next month, and meanwhile he had two papers due in the next few days, a test, a presentation, and that wasn’t even getting started on his reading, plus extracurriculars, sports, family obligations, art—

He needed a vacation. 

More specifically, he needed to not be Spider-Man for a week. 

Just a week. Then he would go back and be twice as productive, twice as efficient, twice as good. He’d be better than ever. He’d make up for it. He wouldn’t take any breaks after this. But some days he woke up and felt like he couldn’t breathe, and his lungs felt full of water and his whole body ached with fatigue and he was fairly certain if he kept treading water at this rate he was going to drown.

“I could use a vacation,” volunteered Gwen, a bit shyly.

“Great,” Peter said. “Miles?”

“Yeah,” Miles said. “I’ll have to ask my parents, but if I can — I’ll go.”

* * *

Once they’ve put half an hour’s worth of distance between them and New York, they get off the interstate and pull into a Walmart parking lot. The afternoon throws long shadows under the car as Miles climbs out of the passenger seat and stretches.

“What are we stopping for?” Gwen asks. “I thought we were staying the night in Punxsutawney.”

“We need provisions,” declares Peter.

“Oh, joy,” Ham says, climbing out of the backseat. “I haven’t been in a Walmart in forever! I’m banned from them in my dimension.”

“I don’t know what a Walmart is,” Noir says, gazing at the storefront, his coat waving dramatically in the wind, “but it looks promising. What do we do at the Walmart?” Ham tugs at his sleeve, and he automatically crouches so Ham can clamber up on his back.

“It’s a store.”

“Oh.”

“You know, you’ll probably see it founded in your lifetime,” Gwen says thoughtfully. She holds up the Wikipedia page on her phone. “The original Walmart was founded in 1962.”

“I will look forward to that.”

“You should invest in it as soon as it goes public,” Peni says. “And Disney. That one’s going to be big.”

“Oh, the mouse man,” Noir says happily. “Yes, I’ve heard of him.”

Miles turns his head towards Gwen, so Noir can’t see him.  _The mouse man,_ he mouths incredulously. She snorts a giggle. Peter just looks disappointed.

The group ambles inside. “I wonder if Ham and Noir shouldn’t have come inside, on second thought,” Gwen says. “Since . . . well. You know. They’re not really inconspicuous figures.”

“We’re not on a stealth mission,” Miles points out. “We don’t have to keep a low profile.”

“Still, though,” she says idly, watching Noir immediately sprint for the toy aisle, Ham directing him like a cavalryman atop his mount. “It feels wrong, somehow.”

“They’re happy, it’s fine,” says Peter, dismissive. “Besides, it’s your dimension. Not like any of our secret identities mean all that much, here.”

“Huh. I guess you’re right.”

Peni wanders back from the canned goods aisle, her arms piled high with cans. “I got chili,” she says eagerly. “I heard that chili was a camping staple.”

“We’re not camping,” Peter says.

“We’re also not eating chili for five days straight,” Miles intervenes. “Put all those back.”

“What else are we supposed to eat? I’ve never been camping before,” Peni says, obligingly tottering back to the canned goods aisle with her mountainous pile of chili. “There aren’t many wildernesses in the future.”

“Candy. Chips. Cookies.” Gwen comes back from the front of the store, pushing a cart. “The usual sleepover stuff.”

Noir comes back from the toy aisle clinging to a paint-by-numbers kit. “What’s the usual sleepover stuff?”

“That’s about the saddest thing I ever heard get said,” says Peter. “Don’t they have sleepovers in 1933?”

“They might. I never had any.”

“Right,” Peter says faintly. “Right. Grimdark miserable lonely past. Sorry.” He claps Noir on the shoulder and wanders into the drinks aisle.

“It’s okay,” Noir says, fairly amicably, all told. “What is sleepover food?”

“Junk food,” Miles says, hopping up on the edge of the cart. Gwen shifts around some of Peni’s chili cans so that he can rest comfortably. “Anything that’s bad for you. Stuff your parents won’t let you eat when you’re home, you know?”

“My parents are dead,” says Noir.

“You were adopted by Aunt May like the rest of us,” Peter hollers, from further down the aisle. “Stop being a drama queen.”

“I was only stating the facts. Also, how can I be a queen? I am not a woman. If anything, I am the drama king.”

“You sure are, big boy!”

“Thank you, Ham.”

Miles webs a family-sized bag of chips and tosses it into the cart. “Point being,” he says, “sleepovers are your chance to eat anything you want. Guilt-free. You like candy?”

“I love candy.” 

Miles has heard wedding vows uttered with less gravitas.  “Awesome. Go get some,” he says, and steers Noir by the shoulders in the direction of the candy display. Noir wanders off somewhat aimlessly, assisted by Ham’s guidance.

“Hey, Miles,” Peter calls. “What kind of chocolate do you like on your s’mores?”

“Milk chocolate. The sweeter the better!”

“Gotcha. Gwen?”

“Eighty-two percent dark.”

“Uh, I’m looking at a Hershey’s display, here, so ...”

“Even your chocolate preferences are pretentious,” Miles giggles. “How long does it take you to order coffee?”

“Shut up.”

“I’m gonna go with ‘bittersweet,’ then,” Peter says, and tosses a few more king-sized bars into his basket. Gwen starts pushing the cart down the aisle, pausing when Mile wants something to get it for him.

A commotion from two aisles over informs him that Ham and Noir are probably causing some ruckus. He decides not to worry about it.

“Which do you think?” He holds up two behemoth popcorn bags, each one approximately the size of his torso. “This one’s got flavoring included, but the other one says it’s extra fluffy crunch.”

“They look equally disgusting. Get both.”

“I like the way you think,” Miles agrees, and tosses them in with the mountain of chips. “Doritos?”

“For Noir’s sake, if nothing else. You know, so he can have the full experience.”

“Good reasoning.” He settles it beside the pizza rolls. “Oh, look, there’s Nutella. Yes, please.”

She snags two boxes of pop-tarts and drops them in the ever-growing hoard. He shifts his position on the edge of the cart to lie solidly in the cradle, sprawled like a boy king amongst a throne of junk food, occasionally using his web-shooter to snag an item that he wants from the shelves.

As they roll past the condiments aisle, she perks up. “Hey Miles, have you ever had a PBJM?”

“Knowing full well that he would live to regret it, he asked:  the  ‘ M ’ stands for  ...?”

“Mayonnaise,” she clarifies.

“Ah. No, I haven’t committed any crimes against humanity, Gwen, but thanks for asking.”

“I’m serious! It’s good!” she laughs. “Here, let’s go get some, I’ll show you—”

“Absolutely not.”

“You won’t know if you like it till you try it!”

“No. Stop it. Gwen, listen to me: that only applies to real food. You can’t use it on your horrible white person sandwiches.”

He tries to climb out of the cart, but she deliberately shoves it forward mid-attempt, and he flops back down. He does, however, sigh in exaggerated distress the whole time while she selects her preferred brand of mayo.

“This is terrible. The fact that you’re making me witness this is terrible.”

“You’ll like it,” she repeats, amused, and tucks the bottle safely out of his reach. She begins to push the cart again, but she pauses. Her eyes flit over the cart, and then light up like she has an idea. Miles waits. 

“Hey.”

“Mmhm.”

“Have you ever ... this is kind of dumb, but—”

“No, tell me.”

“You know that thing you always wanted to do as a kid,” she says, “and your mom made you push the cart? Where you’d—”

“Yes.”

“—and then you’d jump up and just—”

“ _Yes.”_

“—except now we’ve got like, superpowers,” she says, her voice humming with excitement, although she tries to stifle it under nonchalance, “and — listen, this is really, incredibly immature — but we can make it go  _really really_ fast, if we want to?”

“Let’s go,” Miles says, sitting up excitedly. “Let’s go, let’s go let’s go let’s go, and for the record, this is the best idea you’ve ever had—”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t believe I didn’t think of this. This is gonna be so good. God, we’re so smart.”

“Hang on,” she says, grinning, and then starts to run.

The cart picks up speed easily; Gwen’s super strength increases the rate of acceleration to a point that could match most cars. The aisles around Miles blur and bleed into a muddy rainbow of color. The air rushes up in his face as though he’s perched on the front of a motorbike. Gwen puts on a last burst of effort before kicking off and leaping up to hang on to the back of the cart, and the extra momentum rockets them down the length of the store with all the speed and advanced steering options of a pebble launched from a slingshot.

Since he’s sitting in the cart, he doesn’t have many options except to cling for dear life to the cage while it soars down the aisle, wheels screaming against the floor, rattling as it hits uneven patches. The wind rushes in his ears. He lets out a joyful whoop, and Gwen, to his surprise, echoes it — her voice high and reedy with excitement, her cheeks flushed from exertion, perched delicately atop the back of the cart. Her hair flutters in her face. There’s an easy, effortless happiness in the breadth of her smile, in her wide-eyed thrill, in the second laughing hoot that escapes her as the cart hits a turbulent patch. It’s unfamiliar. It makes him happy, too.

Then his face gets hot, and he has to look away.

The cart soars towards the far end of the store, and as the wall rushes up to meet them, it belatedly occurs to Miles that they don’t have any brakes.

Luckily, before this can become an issue, Peter wanders out of the canned goods aisle — his attention focused on his phone — and directly into the cart’s path. 

* * *

“Make that two dimensions,” says Ham cheerfully. He accepts a packet of Skittles from Noir, who had bought four king-sized bags in his excitement at finding a color-based candy.

Peter glares at the road.

Miles offers him the bag in his lap. “Dorito?” he says hopefully.

Peter shakes his head. Miles slowly withdraws the bag and tries to eat one quietly, which doesn’t work.

“I got, um,” Gwen says, redolent with guilt, “some frozen peas. I hear those help.” She draws it from her own bag and holds it out. Peter doesn’t turn his head.

“It’s really not that bad,” Peni says matter-of-factly. “Your healing factor will take care of that in a day or so.”

“Will it?” Peter inquires, through gritted teeth.

“Sure it will. It already looks better than it did ten minutes ago.”

“Hm.”

Miles says, “We really are sorry.”

“So sorry,” adds Gwen quickly. “The sorriest. You don’t even know how sorry we are. Honest.”

Peter takes a moment before replying.

“In the future,” he says, “if you ever feel like—”

Emotion overwhelms him, and he cuts himself off, shaking his head. Miles curls in on himself, a leaden shard of guilt turning in his stomach. 

“Hey, don’t mind him,” Ham assures Miles. “He’ll heal up. But that’s some fine comedic timing you’ve got there, kiddo. Couldn’t have done better myself. Have you considered a career in slapstick?”

“I didn’t mean to!”

“Even better,” he exclaims. “A natural!”

“Peter, stop sulking,” Peni calls, and lobs a piece of popcorn at him. “You’re making Miles sad.”

“I’m making — I got hit with a  _shopping cart!”_

“You got a black eye. Let me go unpack my tiny violin.”

“Easy for you to say!”

“It’s really my fault,” Gwen interrupts. “It was my idea.”

“Oh, don’t try to be noble about this,” Peter whines.

“No, I’m serious. I suggested it, and I was the one pushing it, so legally speaking, he’s an accomplice at best—”

“I feel like a dick for being mad when you try to be noble,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “And — Miles, I know you’re guilt tripping me, stop giving me that look—”

“I’m not doing anything,” Miles says indignantly.

“That’s just your conscience, Peter,” Peni says around a mouthful of popcorn.

“Thanks for your input, Peni.”

“No problem!” She flashes a peace sign and grins with her mouth still full of food.

“How far is it to Punxsutawney, again?”

“Two hours,” Gwen says.

“This was a bad idea.”

“Would anyone like some Skittles?” Noir pipes up. “They’re delightful.”

Peter drags his hand down his face, and then pulls himself together. “You know what,” he says, “yeah. Yeah, I’d love some Skittles. Thanks.”

* * *

They don’t quite make it to Punxsutawney before sunset. Peter pulls off the road a few miles out and they shoal up in a motel: a short, L-shaped two-story building with crackling yellow fluorescents lighting the walk in front of each door. The parking lot is mostly empty, and the manager barely glances at Ham and Noir over the rim of their magazine before handing over their keys. Inside each room is cramped and papered in vomit-green, with tacky quilted bedspreads and pillows that smell of chlorine, and a spiderweb crack carves an unhappy smile in the window. Miles has to web the deadbolt to keep it in place.

“I love it,” Peni announces fervently.

“What?” Even Peter is surprised by this. 

“I’ve never slept anywhere this ugly before,” she declares, and vaults onto the bed.

They bought two rooms, but they pile into one in order to watch a movie. Bags of chips are cracked open, popcorn bags are passed around with fumbling, greasy hands, and the candy is pooled for collective enjoyment. The remote is squabbled over, dropped, tossed around, made the subject of a brief and intense game of keep-away, stolen by web-shooter about half a dozen times, and subsequently delivered unto Gwen’s safekeeping.

“What kind of movies you got in this dimension?” Peter, sprawled on one of the beds, kicks up his feet and catches the Snickers bar that Miles throws at him. “Tell me there’s a Star Wars in your universe, Gwen.”

“There is,” she confirms. She’s perched on the end of the other bed, flipping idly through channels. “It was kind of a dud, though. Never got a sequel.”

“Episode 37 just came out in my dimension,” Peni remarks, and shifts to lie down on Gwen’s bed. Noir, sitting against the headboard, shuffles over to make room, and she uses his knee as a pillow. “It’s a total knockoff, though. It cribs basically everything from Episode 12.”

“No spoilers,” Peter says.

“Jurassic Park?” Miles suggests, pulling the last bag of popcorn from the microwave and flopping down along the foot of Peter’s bed. He webs himself a pillow from under Peter’s arm, which Peter makes a vague, unsuccessful grab to repossess in midair. “That one’s good.”

“You’re not old enough for that film,” Ham says, aghast. He sits on the floor between beds, swaddled in blankets. There’s a pun in there somewhere, but Miles thinks it would probably be in bad taste.

“What, Jurassic Park? It’s Spielberg, man, it’s fine.”

“You shouldn’t be watching R-rated movies!”

“What happens in _your_ Jurassic Park?”

“Gwen,” says Peter suddenly.  “Who do you think Luke’s father is?”

Dead silence.

Gwen frowns. “I don’t know. I don’t remember — he’s like, a fighter pilot? I think? I haven’t watched in a wh—”

Peter lets out an elephantine noise of triumph and glee. “She doesn’t—”

Peni hastily webs his mouth. “ _Shhhh_ ,” she hisses. “No spoilers!”

“I don’t know what?”

Ham claps his hands. “ Gwen. Gwennifer. Gwennifred. Tonight you experience a hallowed American coming-of-age moment .”

“This sounds weird. I don’t like it.”

Peter waves his hands frantically. “No, no, it’s okay. It’s a classic.”

“Is this going to be like that time you made me watch Shrek.”

“Ha— okay, no, but that was different—”

“You said that it was a film classic. Peter.”

“In my defense, it is. But also, no, trust me! This is good.”

“That’s what you said about Shrek.”

“Yes, but this is Star Wars!  _Star Wars_ , Gwen!”

“Nerd,” she mutters. Miles lazily holds his hand up for an air-five, which she returns.

After wrestling in vain to get the television — a fat black box with graphics that were already out of date when Miles was born — to broadcast interdimensional cable, Peni gives up and pops open her laptop on top of the television stand. Credits roll, Peter hits the lights, and popcorn bags make rounds around the room.

Miles notices some differences immediately. Luke is blonde, not a brunet; the Yoda puppet, instead of pale green, is a vibrant purpleish blue; Jabba is an eight-armed arachnid of some kind with lots of teeth and a cadre of . There’s also a lot of tension between Luke and Han that he doesn’t remember from the original, although that might just be something that eight-year-old Miles missed.

The size of the screen makes it difficult to see clearly from the TV stand. Eventually Peni moves it to the foot of one bed and everyone shuffles over so the girls can fit, and Miles pretends to ignore how Gwen’s become suspiciously invested in getting a spot with a good view of the screen.

“Obi-Wan never told you,” booms Vader, tinny and somber, and Peter sits up with his fists in the air, beaming delightedly at Gwen — who despite herself is hunched forward on her knees, eyes wide — as he continues:

“Luke, I am your mother.”

Peter screams. Miles sits up in dazed excitement as Peni dives for Peter and shoves a pillow over his mouth, hissing about neighbors and noise complaints and 911 calls, and Ham laughs so hard he falls off the bed and face-plants into a bowl of popcorn. And Miles is going to lose feeling in his cheeks from grinning, because Gwen’s little gasp of shock is the purest thing he’s ever heard.

“—going to get us kicked out of here, are you crazy!”

“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it! You  _knew_ , Peni. You knew and you sat there and said nothing! You let me think—!”

Noir turns around in surprise. “Wait,” he says. “Was it not obvious?”

“Obvious!”

“Obi-Wan says that Luke’s father is dead, and that Vader killed him,” he says patiently. “Which establishes that the father is not in the picture. Then, there is a very long scene in the cave on Dagobah that foreshadows—”

“Because Vader is his  _dad!_ ”

“Wait, what?” says Peni.

“But that doesn’t make sense,” Gwen argues, turning around. “Obi-Wan says Anakin Skywalker is dead. Killed by Vader. If they were the same person, why would he lie?”

“He’s speaking metaphorically! He’s a mystical dude!”

“That seems kind of deliberately misleading, though,” she continues. “Like, he knows fully well that Luke is going to take him to mean ‘dead’ in the literal sense, right? He’s not under any impression that Luke is going to understand what he means by that.”

“It’s to protect him from the truth!”

“Then why admit to knowing him at all? Why not just say, ‘sorry, Luke, I don’t know who your father was, there’s literally billions of people in the universe, tough luck’? Why set him up for this nasty bait-and-switch?”

“Because he’s the one who brought Beru and Owen the friggin’  _baby!_ It’s the only way to explain how he even knows who Artoo and Luke are in the first place! And — bonus — Owen and Beru still think that Anakin is dead, so he doesn’t want to give away—”

“That is not clear,” Noir says, lifting one finger in objection. “Beru says that Luke is too much like his father, but this could mean many things. Perhaps Anakin was a reckless man, and she fears Luke being similar. But she could also mean he is too much like Vader.”

“Seems unlikely,” Peni says. “All Luke’s done so far is ask to go to the pilot academy with his friends. He’s not doing anything that would warrant a comparison with Space Mussolini.”

“True, but Obi-Wan is nevertheless being intentionally obfuscatory. This is not a problem, since I believe his character is made more interesting by the choice to lie in order to convince a teenager to enlist as a foot soldier in a violent interstellar civil conflict.”

“Obi-Wan isn’t morally grey,” howls Peter. “You people can’t make him morally grey, I refuse, I won’t allow it.”

“I did not make him morally grey, Peter. George Lukas did. I have no control over the Star Wars.”

“Shut up, Noir, you haven’t even watched the first movie.”

“True. I do have a masters in literature.”

“Like hell you do.”

“Language,” Ham calls. “There’s babies present.”

Peter blows a raspberry and flings a pillow at him. Ham catches it and whips it around with such startling force that it smacks Peter’s head into the headboard.

“All right, that’s it, Pork Chop, come here—”

“ _En garde_ , homo un-sapiens!”

“We’re never gonna get back to the movie,” Gwen tells Miles. She sounds amused, but her disappointment is obvious.

“Oh, yeah.” He snaps a photo of Peter scrambling up the wall to reach Ham, who clings to the ceiling. “You wanna go over to your room and finish it?”

“Won’t Peni mind? It’s her laptop.”

“Eh,” he says, as Peni snatches up a pillow and smacks Ham so hard he soars into the opposite wall with the force of a torpedo. “I don’t think she’ll actually notice.”

“Hm,” says Gwen. “Probably.”

They sneak out while the war wages on. True to form, Peni neither notices nor cares.

When they get back it’s almost midnight, and the room has been transformed by war. Cotton stuffing carpets the ground like a blanket of snow, and feathers drift slowly through the air in a mimicry of falling ash, twisting mournfully over the ravaged battlefield. Both beds had been divested of their pillows, the covers stripped back, and the curtain-rod has been torn from the wall, spilling pink insulation foam and a white veil of drywall. Splotches of webbing run along the walls, chase each other up through the ceiling, and tangle with each other in clumsy knots, Peter’s knobby rope laced with Noir’s white silk and Ham’s globular splotches. 

One blade of the fan dangles from its snapped base, rotating slowly and gloomily.

Lounging on the bed in the throes of her conquest lies Peni, resplendent on a throne of shredded pillows, her feet kicked up and resting on Ham’s back. Peter snoring on the floor, leaned against the side of the bed; Noir is face-down on the carpet, spread-eagle.

“Oh, hi, you two,” Peni says, texting. “How was the movie?”

“Pretty good,” Gwen says.

“How did you feel about the kiss?”

“I don’t know. I mean, Leia and Han seem nice together? But I felt like he was obviously just doing it to spite Luke.”

“That’s what I thought. I’ll put on  _Return_ tomorrow.”

“I assume that’s the sequel?”

“Episode Six, yeah.”

“Three,” corrects Miles, climbing onto the bed next to Peni.

“Six. They didn’t start numbering until the prequels.”

“What prequels?”

“Early twenty-first century. Peter has a lot of opinions about them.”

Gwen sandwiches Peni on the other side, hip-bumping her into the middle of the bed. She webs the covers and hauls them up, claiming a frankly gluttonous amount of blanket for herself. “Did anyone come up to complain about the noise?”

“He did. Ham and Noir answered the door.”

“…And?”

“Assuming nobody calls animal control, we’re fine.”

“That would be funny,” Miles mumbles. He furtively tries to sneak a pillow out from Peni’s stash, and she graciously lifts her arm to permit it.

“You do know,” says Gwen, snuggling into the bedspread, “we’re going to have to pay for wrecking the room.”

“Eh,” said Peni, fluttering her fingers. “The inflation rate in the future is nuts. I can care of it.”

“I’m not sure the motel is gonna accept bills from 3145, Pen.”

“Oh, right. Darn.” Peni pauses. Gwen snorts. “So, drop the key and run?”

“That’s illegal,” Miles informs her.

“Leave before they find out and charge us?”

“That’s also illegal.”

Miles tentatively tries to tug over some more blanket. Gwen makes an alarmingly animalistic noise and snatches it back. 

“Gwen, please. I’m cold.”

“Sounds like a you problem.”

“Please?”

“Go get the other bed’s,” she says sourly, her voice already thick with sleep.

“That’s Noir’s bed.”

“S’ not using it.”

“You’re really doing this.”

“Hnnnnnn. Maybe.”

“You’re really gonna make me get up and walk all the way over there and get my own blanket. Gwen.”

“Sorry, can’t hear you. Already sleeping.”

“Shhhhhhh,” Peter groans, his hand smacking blindly at the comforter. “Shuddit, wouldja, some of us are trying to sleep.”

“Peter, she won’t share the blanket.”

“Good for her.”

“No!”

“Not good for her. Oh, well.”

“Peter! You’re an adult! Make her give it back. ”

“Gwen, be nice,” he mutters obligingly.

“No.”

“Well, I did all I could. Goodnight.”

Miles kicks him in the shoulder. Peter whines and swats lazily in his direction. 

“Someone hit the lights,” Gwen mumbles into the pillow, having satisfactorily mummified herself in blankets. Miles glowers jealously at her warm cocoon.

Peter grabs his webslinger and haphazardly points it at the lamp. In his tired state, Miles realizes the mistake a moment too late.

“No,  _don’t_ —”

The web knocks the lamp clean off the table. The lightbulb shatters, and the light goes out.

In the darkness, Miles feels himself flicker invisible out of sheer embarrassment. 

“Whoopsie,” Peter says, and his head topples back onto the mattress.

Peni turns over under the covers. “Go d’sleep, Miles,” she mumbles. “G’night.”

“G’night, Miles,” Gwen says.

“G’nn. M’ls.”

Miles puts his face in his hands. Incredulously, he feels a broad and irrepressible smile there, pressing through despite his better intentions.

“You’re all terrible.”

Peter gives a very loud and elaborately choreographed snore. It could have been mistaken for a laugh.

“Okay. Goodnight.”

He wraps himself in the little strip of blanket Gwen afforded him and rolls onto his side. The girls are breathing long and slow, their shoulders rising and falling in a slightly delayed rhythm like a sine wave. Peter’s snores nearly drown out the growl of cars on the distant road and the rattle of the air vents. The bed is warm, and the room is full of twirling white feathers, drifting down light and soft on his head.

He falls asleep faster than he has in months.


	2. disc two

In the morning, they’re on the road before ten. Before this can happen, Peter spends the better part of two hours in front of the concierge’s desk, wheedling, arguing, and whipping out every lawyerly piece of terminology in his surprisingly broad arsenal — “And so, ex post facto, you see that your post-hoc argument for quid pro quo is utterly _coram non judice,_ which basically means that you are, as they say, _habeas corpus_ ” — to get them out the door. In support, Noir stands very close to the desk with his arms folded, which probably helps more, all told.

They make a Starbucks run once they reach Punxsutawney, and they eat on the highway, the windows rolled down and the wind carding their hair. Gwen takes shotgun today, sprawling with her combat boots perched high on the dash and one elbow draped across the divider. In between enormous bites of egg and cheese breakfast sandwich, she takes long slugs from a cask of black coffee larger than Miles’ head. She’s wearing a faded red leather jacket, and her undercut is still damp from the shower, darkened to a creamy golden brown by the water.

Peter drives, again, sipping now and then from a frappuchino. The car smells like coffee and fried things, sausage and potato and the baker’s dozen box of donuts that Ham and Noir are sharing, and the sticky-sweet smell of the blueberry muffin that Peni munches while she scrolls through her phone. She’s flung her legs over Noir’s lap, and will occasionally make grabby-hands for his coffee cup, which he allows her to sip from but takes back before she can drain it.

“You’re a little young for caffeine, Pen,” Peter observes, eyeing this exchange in the rearview. His t-shirt, which bears the long-term discoloration of armpit stains, shows Wonder Woman flexing a pair of massive biceps and beaming. Batman and Superman are perched on each shoulder, respectively, both mid-swoon.

“And you’re a little young for grey streaks, but here we are.”

Peter grins, but hides it by looking out the window. “I’m just saying. If I was your size, I’d be real careful with substances said to stunt your growth.”

“I’m not short!”

“Not for a twelve year old, no.”

“I’m not going to stunt my growth!”

“You know what, I’m sure you’re right. And hey, I know plenty of adults who are less than five feet tall.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means he thinks you’re going to be a real pint-sized dame,” says Noir, helpfully.

“I told you, I’m not short!”

“You’re always be a giant to me, squirt,” Ham says comfortingly.

Noir nods. “In my day, you’d be average height already, short stuff.”

“Ha! There, Peter!”

“Right,” says Peter. “On an unrelated note, don’t your doctors still tell people to smoke?”

Peni lobs her muffin wrapper at his head. He ducks, and it sails out the window, lost to the wind.

“Tut, tut. Littering is bad for the earth, Peni. Think of Gwen’s planet.”

“Yeah, think of my planet,” Gwen says, without taking her earphones out.

“Your planet sucks. Your technology is backwards. You doesn’t even have Star Wars.”

“Gwen’s planet owns bones,” Miles says loyally.

“Thank you, Miles. Peni, you are cordially invited to suck it.”

“Kids! Be nice to each other.”

“I said  _cordially_ invited.”

“I’ll pull this car over.”

Gwen mutters and fusses with the aux. Peni takes a gulp of coffee so large that her cheeks balloon, out of spite. Miles eats his bagel with deliberate expressionlessness.

“Hold on,” Noir says suddenly. “Is smoking bad for you?”

Sometime shortly after passing Chicago, the horizon flattens to a perfect line and the grass rises in tall brackets of yellow corn. Buildings disappear, and cars grow scarce on the road. The fields run from one end of the sky to the other, rippling like a golden sea. It doesn’t look like anywhere Gwen’s ever been. Her brain grapples with the idea of this much land existing uninterrupted, without a skyscraper or a parking garage to interrupt the span of it, nothing manmade anywhere except the road and the telephone lines that reach their arms out to nowhere.

The aux gets traded around regularly to restock the queue. Peter’s tunes are old-school, even for him (“Aren’t you a millennial?” “A millennial with  _taste_ , Gwen,”); Ham has no apparent preference for style or genre at all, but picks songs seemingly at random; Noir, upon being handed Gwen’s Spotify, experiences one of the best moments of his and Gwen’s life both when he discovers Linkin Park.

He doesn’t have a great grasp on the lyrics, but he makes up for it in enthusiasm.

On a flat stretch of road Gwen opens the sunroof and stands up in the seat, ignoring Peter’s panicked instructions otherwise, to feel the wind rush past her face. Peni climbs up on her shoulders and sits with her elbows on top of the car, and the girls sun themselves like that for a few miles.

For a while, Miles tries to do his math homework in the backseat. He sits with his legs hunched up and his notebook balanced across his thighs, nibbling on his eraser absentmindedly and humming to whatever music is playing. When he runs into a particularly nasty multiplication or division problem, he’ll read it out loud, and Peni will call out the answer without checking a calculator. He asks a clarifying question about the formula and receives three confident and simultaneous wrong answers from all three adults in the car; Gwen says nothing, but silently texts him the right answer in the group chat she shares with him and Peni.

Peni starts up a game of I-Spy, which runs its short and uneventful course until it is unanimously put down on account of Noir being unable to identify colors by name, and therefore at a severe disadvantage.

As they skirt past Dayton, a snarling leviathan of an eighteen-wheeler barrels out of an on-ramp and cuts Peter off in its stampede to merge. Gwen leans out the window to holler a word that Miles has never heard before at a volume that strains the plausible limits of human lungs. (Noir claps his hands over Peni’s ears.) When Peter speeds up to overtake the semi on an empty stretch, Ham crawls out on top of the car and hocks an egg at the windshield.

Occasionally, a cluster of brown brick buildings and metal poles will spill out of the yellow-green horizon, clinging to the highway in an attempt to offer a bit of relief from the ceaseless white sun. Gas station overhangs cast broad black squares of shade, wood picnic tables cluster in small packs by K-Marts, peppered with old paper cups and popsicle sticks, gum wrappers, cigarette butts, and empty Coke bottles. Peter pulls over in one of these places for a bathroom break, goes in, turns straight around, and drives for twelve more miles until they reach another without saying a word (“I don’t see what was wrong with it,” Noir says, mystified). At that second, marginally cleaner rest stop, Miles and Gwen get packaged ice creams from one of the blue glass-top freezers tucked by the door, and Noir tries desperately to puzzle out the abstractly gendered bathroom signs (“Miles, am I a cat or a rooster? This is a time-sensitive question.”) Then they’re back on the road, climbing to seventy, eighty, ninety miles an hour in the old van, oven-like from its rest in the sun, which groans at every brush of the accelerator and shrieks at a tap of the brakes, music rattling the cracked leather seats.

* * *

“You know, somehow, I thought the scenic midwest would be more interesting,” Miles says.

They are entering hour four of Cornfields: The All-Immersive 3-D Experience. They’ve spotted a license plate from every state in the continental U.S. and two from Alaska. They have run through all of Gwen’s playlists and two of her favorite podcasts.

“Anybody want to play twenty questions?” Peni suggests. Nobody objects, so she says, “Noir, you start. Think of a noun.”

“Okay.”

“Is it an animal?”

“Yes.”

“Spider,” says Gwen.

“Yes,” Noir says, pleasantly surprised, to collective groans.

Peni says, “No, try again. That’s too obvious.”

“You said any noun.”

“It has to be hard to guess. That’s the point.”

“All right.” He thinks. “I’ve got one.”

“Are you sure?” Gwen says.

“Yes.”

“Okay. Is it an animal?”

“Yes.”

“It’s me,” says Ham, sighing.

“Yes!”

“Good job, Gwen, it’s your turn,” Peni says loudly. “Think of a noun.”

Gwen sighs and flops her head back against the seat. “Fine. I’ve got one.”

Miles peels his face off the window and says, “Is it an animal?”

“No.”

“Is it a person?” asks Peni.

“Yes.”

“Are they from this dimension?”

“No.”

“Are they in this car?”

Gwen’s cheeks turn slightly pink.

“Gwen,” says Miles.

“Yes.”

“It’s me again,” says Ham.

“No,” she says defensively.

Peni narrows her eyes at the back of the passenger seat.

“It’s Noir, isn’t it.”

“Yes.”

* * *

For lunch they stop at an IHOP that stands alone, as if planted there and then stranded by some post-apocalyptic town, on an otherwise deserted interstate off-ramp. Peni demolishes two stacks of chocolate chip pancakes covered in golden amber flows of syrup and capped in snowy peaks of whipped cream, while Noir drinks his fourth (fifth?) cup of coffee of the day and Gwen steals banana slices from Miles’ plate. 

“All right,” Peter says, angling a forkful of waffle at the map on the table. “Here’s how I see it. If we keep driving for four, five hours, we can make it past Indiana — Ham, put down the condiment bottles, so help me — before nightfall. Alternatively,” he continues, brandishing his fork to forestall the chorus of groans, “alternatively, since I’m getting some stir-crazy vibes, here’s what I’m thinking: we stop somewhere this afternoon, switch up the schedule, and wing it tomorrow.”

“Not to be dramatic,” Gwen says, “but if I have to sit in that car for another six hours without stretching my legs, I’m going to hurl myself onto the freeway.”

“Well, as long as you’re not being dramatic,” Miles says.

“Shut up.” She takes more of his banana. He pokes her hand with his fork.

“I want to do some dumb touristy thing,” Peni declares. “Something really stupid and meaningless. Like, the world’s second largest ball of artificially manufactured twine, or something.” 

“Clark County’s most complicated semi-permanent corn maze,” suggests Ham. “Iowa’s oldest living hermaphroditic cow.”

She points at him emphatically with her knife:  _this guy gets it_ .

Gwen’s nose wrinkles. “Why?”

“Local culture. Also, a lot of this stuff doesn’t exist in the future. I want to get an authentic glimpse of the American past.” She wraps her mouth around a colossal wedge of solid compressed pancake.

“The only ‘authentic’ thing you’ll be getting is overpriced gift shops and cheesy photo opportunities,” says Gwen.

“Don’t tell me what I want, woman.”

“There’s plenty of time between here and Illinois. There’s definitely a dumb tourist attraction off the highway,” Peter says. “If that’s what we want to do, suits me. Miles?”

“What?” Miles looks up, belatedly, from a heated tussle for his last quarter of pancake.

“Tourist trap pit stop?”

“Oh, sure,” he says cheerfully. “I love those things. You know those roadside petting zoos with the big plywood boards where you stick your face in and you can take pictures as, like, a farmer or a cow?”

“Why, though?” demands Gwen, amused. “Those places have negative entertainment value. It’s just a bunch of normal animals. They act like it’s not something you could run into after five minutes in any town in the midwest. ‘Oh, wonder of wonders! Tame livestock!’”

“Hey, speak for yourself. I’m a city mouse. Do you know how often in my day-to-day I get to see a goat?”

“I see one every time I look in the mirror,” Peni crows around a mouthful of pancake, and Miles reaches across to slap her five without turning his head. She grabs for Noir’s coffee, and he silently lifts it out of reach.

“This sounds vaguely offensive,” Ham says.

“No, no, it’s…” Miles pauses. “I mean, there are… pigs? Sometimes? But they can’t talk.” He pauses again. “Um. But we can always do something else, since I can see… how that would be… distressing. For you.”

Ham cracks a grin. “Nah. It’s okay. I love petting zoos. So much fun!” Miles eases, and he continues, “All those cute hairy humans running around and doing tricks for food.”

“All right, settled then,” Peter says (“What?” says Miles). He rolls up the map, having obviously clocked out of the conversation long since. “Check and check. We’ll make a stop before Illinois.”

“Soonish?” Gwen says hopefully.

“Oh, yeah. Easy. Another hour or two of driving, tops,” Peter says, reaching for the syrup. “These things are like cockroaches, they’re everywhere. We’re out of the car by three o’clock. Guarantee it.”

As it turns out, he’s not wrong.

* * *

“You  _had_ to complain about stretching your legs,” says Peter.

Gwen — hip cocked, arms folded, eyebrow arched with cruel and perfect un-impressment over the rim of her aviators — snaps her head around to look at him. “How is this my fault?”

“I don’t know, maybe something to do with that monkey’s paw you packed?”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Guardian angels don’t hear sarcasm, Gwen. They’re jerks like that.”

“None of this is my fault! You’re the one who was driving! If anything, this is on you!”

“Oh, sure. A convenient scapegoat.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“Excuse you, I’m very sufferable. And until this car gets moving, you get to suffer me, O. Henry.”

Miles wanders around the side of the car, one hand shielding his eyes from the sun. Behind him, smoke trails from the engine, which had given out with a shuddering wheeze on a long stretch of cornfields in southern Indiana. “Yeah, Peni’s got nothing,” he says apologetically. “Says this kind of thing is way too old-school for her, she doesn’t even recognize half the parts in your engine.”

Peter squints. “She can reverse-engineer a portable inter-dimensional transport with Wi-Fi included, but the Volkswagen is too complex?”

“Yeah? To her, it’s an antique,” he says, reasonably. “My shop teacher doesn’t know how to fix a Rolls-Royce, I bet.”

“Can’t she just stick a hovercraft thruster on the back, or something? Give us some juice?”

“Sorry, I left my hovercraft thrusters at home,” Peni deadpans, sticking her head out from behind the hood. Grease smears her left cheek, and the rubber mechanic gloves comically dwarf her small hands. “Along with all my spare engine parts for a car that’s been out of circulation for a century in my universe.”

“Can’t you just rewire the doohickey and jumpstart the goober?”

“You have a degree in chemical engineering?” Ham says.

Peter gesticulates. “You know what I mean. You’re an engineer! Engineer it!”

“That word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

“This is no time to be quoting excellent sci-fi movies, Gwen.”

“I don’t think arguing is gonna get us anywhere,” Miles says. “We’ve got to push.”

Peter sighs. “Fine,” he says. “I’ll get up front, and you—”

“No,” Gwen interrupts. A smirk bends the corner of her lip. “Peni drives. We push.”

“Why?” he whines.

“Because we’ve got _superpowers_ , genius, and she doesn’t.” She nods to Peni.

Peter visibly sags. “Right,” he says. “Forgot about that. Sorry, Pen.”

“The fact that you forgot I didn’t have superpowers is the opposite of offensive to me.”

“In his defense,” Noir tells her, “you are an incredibly imposing child.”

“Thank you,” she says, sounding genuinely touched.

Gwen shrugs off her jacket and unfurls what Miles considers a truly unfair amount of bicep for one person. “Peter, Noir, you push the back. Miles and I will use the front doors for leverage. Ham, you go… wherever, I don’t know how strong you are.”

“Whatever is situationally the funniest.”

“What, literally?”

“Yes.”

“That’s… fine, I guess. Try the back, then.”

Peni hops into the driver’s seat. Her feet don’t quite touch the pedals, so she scoots forward and braces herself on one foot, standing upright to reach the brakes. She shifts into neutral, and Miles notices her hand instinctively move upwards and to the right, fingers reaching for an electric control-board that isn’t there. Then she balls them into a fist and clamps them down on the wheel.

“Okay,” she calls, “Ready.”

Gwen braces herself against the front door. “All right. On three: one, two—”

Here is what Miles learns from the following experience.

First, that five superheroes with accelerated strength pushing a car on foot — even a heavy car — can make surprisingly good time on the interstate.

Second, that said experience can be surprisingly fun, once the car starts rolling, and you can use it kind of like a skateboard.

And third, that by far the best part of said experience is the expression on a passing driver’s face as they are overtaken by five people pushing a car on foot at fifty miles an hour.

* * *

They don’t make it to any tourist traps. Or to a roadside petting zoo, which is a stroke of misfortune that nobody except Miles takes as seriously as they should.

After getting the engine fixed by a roadside mechanic (a broad-shouldered, round-bellied man in a blue jumpsuit who doesn’t so much as blink when Ham and Noir step out from behind the car; “Seen worse,” he says simply, and asks for the keys) they finally roll into a small town on the western side of Illinois as the sun starts to set. 

There’s a small fifties-style diner across the street from the motel. It’s the kind of place that Miles couldn’t find in Brooklyn if he tried, so wholly un-ironic is its celebration of a retrofitted style: the enormous, towering light-up sign, the jutting forty-five degree roof, the winking neon swirls and decals that hang in each wide window. Stepping inside is a bath of cold air so sudden that it freezes the sweat on the back of his neck where it lies. 

The interior is a dozen variations on a cliché: checkered floors, red booths, a bar with vinyl stools. Fluorescent lights bounce off linoleum tabletops and metal napkin dispensers and the glass pie case, where lazy susans twirl in unhurried rotations. A glowing dome-topped jukebox rests in the seat of honor at the back of the room, under a poster for a Clint Eastwood film and between two boisterous potted palms.

“I love it,” Peni says.

They get a booth, which involves a little more squeezing than is strictly speaking comfortable — Peni ends up sandwiched between Noir and Peter, and there’s a round of not-quite-insincere jokes about getting Ham a highchair — but after hours bunched together in the car, nobody minds. The waitress comes by in an honest-to-God pink button-down dress with a white apron, and Miles asks to take a picture of her out of sheer delight.

Ham makes a move for the jukebox, and three simultaneous shots of webbing nail him to the back of the seat.

“I didn’t think places like this still existed,” Gwen says, flipping out the laminated menu. 

“They don’t. It’s all modern. You know, the aesthetic? Apparently it’s cool these days.” Peter examines the specials list with a discerning eye. “Googie architecture, man. It’s making a comeback.”

“Seems crooked,” says Noir darkly. “Duplicitous fake architecture. Trying to scam the public.”

“No, no. It’s nostalgia. Somebody thought the fifties ‘look’ was cool, and decided to crib it. The trend so nice we used it twice.”

“Hm.” He considers this. “Is there nostalgia for the thirties?”

Peter chokes. “No, buddy.”

“No?”

“Uh, we’re not super eager to relive that time period, you know, as a culture? Which is not to say the fifties were all that great or anything, frankly, they still sucked a big one as time periods go, but, uh, yeah. We like the thirties even less.”

“Good.”

“Wh— yeah? Good?”

“Our diners aren’t nearly as cute,” Noir says solemnly.

“What,” says Peni, her head fully buried in the enormous panels of the menu, “is a Bailey’s shake?”

Peter’s eyes bug. “Tha-at’s not for you,” he says, his voice pitching sharply in the bridge of the word, and reaches over to turn the page for her. “Why don’t you grab a root beer float, kiddo?”

She tugs it back. “Seriously, what is it?”

“It’s alcohol. Whisky.”

“Can I get one?”

“No.”

She turns to Noir. “Can you get one and share with me?”

“Sure thing, kid.”

“No,” Peter orders, jabbing a finger at Noir. “Bad Spider-Man. Wrong. Try again.”

“Why not? She’s been good.”

“She’s a _minor_.”

Noir blinks. “What’s a minor?”

“Jesus. Gwen, can you—?”

“Drinking age is twenty-one in the U.S.,” Gwen says, bored, tossing her own menu on the table. “Eighteen everywhere else. Peni, you  _know_ that.”

“Maybe,” she says, sulking.

“So,” says Noir, placing his hands palm-down on the table, “to be clear: children aren’t… supposed… to drink.”

“No,” Peter says, deeply unhappy. “They’re not, buddy.”

“In any universe?”

“In any universe.”

Noir nods, takes a notebook out of his pocket, and writes something in it.

“What’s that?” asks Miles.

“I got a list of things I gotta talk to the mayor about.”

“…Of New York?”

“Yep.”

“You know the mayor of New York.”

“Eh,” says Noir, shrugging.

“Noir.”

“Yeah.”

“You can’t just say something like that and not elaborate.”

“You know how it is,” Noir says, which Miles absolutely does not. “Knocked a coupla nogoodniks from his office around the block a coupla years ago, the cat owes me a buncha favors. More time I spend in the future, the more I figure I’d better start calling them in.”

Miles considers for a moment and decides that he really isn’t surprised. “Cool. What else is on there?”

“Smoking. Public transit. Affordable housing. Asbestos.” He squints at the list. “That one’s underlined twice.”

“Add air pollution,” Gwen says, flagging over the waitress.

“Yes’m.”

“And public education,” says Miles.

“Got it.”

The waitress comes over. Her hair is hauled up in an unforgiving bun. She puts her hands in her pockets and snaps her gum.

“You’re gonna want to get something to write on,” Peter says apologetically.

Ten minutes later, the waitress hurries away like someone escaping the grounds of a nuclear test site.

“I think she thinks we’re demons of some kind,” Peter says mildly.

“That’s ridiculous. We look nothing like demons,” says Noir, with a startling degree of confidence.

“It’s not our fault,” Ham protests, leaning on his elbows. He has to stand on the seat to reach the table. “We’ve got accelerated metabolisms.”

“Ahem.”

“And Peni’s just like that.”

“Thank you.”

“She  _thinks_ we’re gonna dine and dash,” Gwen says, massaging the bridge of her nose. Miles pats her on the shoulder.

“Why, I never,” says Peter. “A respectable party like us?”

* * *

Between their drinks arriving (Peni gets a strawberry milkshake under a Christmas tree of whipped cream, ornamented with candied strawberries and maraschino cherries; Noir, a black coffee) and their food, Miles slips outside with his cell phone and a muttered excuse to Gwen.

It’s hard to get service this far out in the country. He has to stand near the van to catch Peni’s Wi-Fi signal, and even then, it’s spotty, but he can get enough to make a call.

His dad picks up on the first ring.

“Miles!”

“Hey, Dad.” The light from the diner casts a pink glow across the parking lot. He leans against the side of the van and watches the others through the window.

“Hey, hey. How are you?” There’s the scrape of a chair, flutter of papers. Hurried footsteps, slightly more labored breath. His hearing picks up the murmur of other voices in the background, indistinguishable to the normal ear.

“Are you at work?”

“No,” says his dad, unconvincingly.

“Dad.”

“I had some paperwork to clean up at the precinct, it’s not real work. I can leave anytime. What’s up?”

“It’s seven-thirty. Dad.”

“I’ll go home soon. Miles—”

“What happened to reasonable work hours?”

He can hear his dad laugh, softly. “All right, all right.” A door closes, a lock clicks. “So, uh. How are you?”

“I’m doing good,” he says. Awkwardly. He wishes he was smoother. He sounds more uncomfortable than he is, which makes him uncomfortable, which makes him sound even more uncomfortable, and the worst part is that he knows his dad is trying  _so hard_ , that it’s not like this is any easier for him.

“That’s good.” His dad waits. Miles does, too. “Uh, your road trip thing. How’s that going? Where are you now?”

“Um. Someplace in Illinois? I think?” He looks around for a road sign. “Near Marshall, if that means anything.”

“Cool. Cool. Where are you staying tonight?”

“We’re getting a room nearby. A Motel-Seven.”

“Hm.”

“What ‘hm’?”

“Nothing! Nothing.” His dad backpedals, hastily, but can’t resist leaving a parting shot: “Those places can be kind of sketchy.”

Miles rolls his eyes. “I think I’ll be fine.”

“I know, it’s just—”

“We’re totally safe, I told you. We went over this.”

“Yeah,” his dad says quietly. “I know. I just wanted to make sure you were careful.” He pauses. His breathing is slow and careful. Sound of a man weighing his words, letter by letter. “I trust you, though. Of course.”

Miles closes his eyes.

_Shouldn’t be this hard. Say something! Why is it this hard? He’s your dad, he loves you, and you love him, and you both know it. This should be easy. The hard part is over._

“Okay. Thanks.”

_Nice one._

“Uh-huh,” says his dad, clearly relieved. “Anyway. How’s Officer Stacy?”

Miles winces.

It’s not his fault, really, the lying. It was just the once, because he had to ask, he had to find some way to convince his dad to let him go, and somehow, saying “the most qualified adult chaperone in my party is a thirty-something deadbeat alternate-reality version of a guy you used to hate” didn’t seem like the right way to pitch it. Or “another, more competent alternate-reality version of a guy you hate, who comes from 1933 and has to be told kids can’t drink.” Or “okay, get this: a talking pig—”

So. Officer Stacy. Who is a qualified, mature, put-together father of a person Miles’ age, successful in his career — which just so  _happens_ to be the same one as Miles’ dad — and whose name fell out of Miles’ mouth more or less on accident when his dad asked who would be driving.

It’s a little white lie. It’s not nearly as big as the Spider-Man thing was. That was much worse. In comparison, this is small potatoes, and it really doesn’t matter. Except that Miles was trying to do the honesty thing, really, he was trying so,  _so_ hard, because he knows his dad is trying, too.

Inside, Peter is trying to engage Gwen in a spitball war.

“He’s doing great,” he says. Thinks: please, please don’t ask to talk to him, please.

Maybe his dad understands more than he lets on, because he doesn’t. Then Miles thinks,  _that’s because he trusts you_ , and it feels so much worse. “And Gwen?” his dad prompts, expectant. “How’s she?”

“She’s really good.”

Beat. Miles worries he’s given something away, but then his dad says, with an absolutely evil veneer of indifference: “Really good, huh?”

“Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no—”

“Is she? That’s nice.”

“I’m going to hang up. I’m going to hang up and jump into a river.”

“You know, when I first met your mother—”

“Please don’t tell me. I don’t want to know about weird gross stuff that you and mom did when you were kids, I don’t, you can’t do this, there are laws—”

“—I would’ve given an arm and a leg to have a week alone on the open road with her. Of course,” his dad says reflectively, as Miles hunches on his knees and pretends to dry heave, “we were in our twenties, then, and we wouldn’t have had a chaperone.”

“I’m begging you. I’m your son and I’m begging you.”

“Would’ve been a very different experience if her father was around, of course,” his dad adds thoughtfully. “Not on his end, though. You know Grandpa Morales is a free-spirited man. Not at all puritan. Course, he was a child of the sixties, Woodstock, free love, all that stuff. Me, I was a bit more uptight, and I don’t know about Officer Stacy—”

“She’s not going to  _steal my virtue_ , Dad, please—”

“You’re darn right she’s not. You’d better believe you’re going to bring that girl around for your mother and I to meet before you kids get into any kind of hanky-panky.”

“Forget it. Just for that, I’m going to become a monk.”

“Good for you,” his dad says indulgently. “Follow your path.”

“I’m serious. You can forget about grandchildren.”

“Oh, I’ll be fine, don’t you worry. Officer Stacy, though, you’d have to ask—”

Miles lets out a sound like a strangled cat. His dad laughs, long and loud. For a second, Miles thinks, he sounds an awful lot like — but he’s imagining things, it’s been too long, he’s forgetting. There’s no way his dad sounds like Uncle Aaron.

“Ah,” he says, between the chuckling aftershocks, “I’m giving you a hard time.”

“I’m glad you realize that. Admitting you have a problem is the first step.”

“You know you can invite her over, if you want.”

“After this conversation, there is a negative percent chance that’s going to happen.”

“Whatever you say,” his dad says, amused, like he knows Miles doesn’t mean it. “But you know your mother would be over the moon. And I’d be good.”

“Ha, ha.”

“I would!”

“I’m sure,” he says, cutting his eyes at the window. Gwen is sprawled over the space where he used to sit, her arm flung along the back of the booth. Her sunglasses hang from the neckline of a washed-out grey Foo Fighters t-shirt, and she sips from a long-necked Coke bottle with one hand wrapped around its lip, casual, like she could spin around and break it over someone’s face without blinking. She just looks so  _cool_ .

She glances out the window, and catches Miles looking. A soft smile tugs her lip, and she turns away.

Gwen is a leather-jacket toting, undercut-sporting, fist-fighting, tough-as-nails fully-fledged member of a punk rock band. She’s the kid who rolls up at the curb with a motorbike and gives every mother on the block a heart attack thinking she’ll stop at their door. But then, she’s also a straight-A student, ballet dancer, youth tutor, and a full-time superhero, an unbelievably stereotypical poster-child for good influence who might as well wear a sign around her neck that says ‘Your Parents Will Adore Me.’ His mom might not let her leave.

How  _would_ she act with his parents? Would she be good with them? Clever, friendly, flattering? It doesn’t seem like her. But it doesn’t seem like her to be  _bad_ with them, either. Awkward, maybe. She’s kind of antisocial. He’d need to mediate. Run interference with Dad, definitely. Mom would be fine. Mom can be trusted. They could bond over having perfect hair and devastating expressions of disappointment. He’s spiraling. It’s been too long since he’s said something. He needs to say something.

His dad is laughing, again. 

“Hello? Earth to Miles?”

“Yes. Hi. Hello. What.”

“Is she there?”

“No,” he says, stubbornly. “I was just thinking.”

“I can guess.”

“Stop it.”

“I’m not doing anything,” his dad laughs. “Am I interrupting? Is there something you want to get back to?”

Miles’ face turns warm, and he deliberately turns his back on the window. “No. I’m fine. I’m here, I’m actively listening.”

“Okay.” Amusement in disbelief. “Are you having a good time?”

He breathes out, heavy, and sags against the van. “Yeah,” he says, and surprises himself by how much he means it. He hasn’t thought about — and he blinks, wide-eyed, because he hasn’t thought seriously about Spider-Man since getting in the car. Abstractly, maybe. But not in the way that involves schedule planning for patrols and figuring out which costume has been recently washed and buying extra gauze and Advil. It felt like another possession he left behind in his universe.

He’s still Spider-Man here. But he’s with the others. So he can let it slide.

“It’s been really good.” He hesitates. “We saw a bunch of corn. And cows.”

“Cows,” says his dad, trying so very, very hard it makes Miles’ cheeks hurt. “Very cool.”

“It’s not, really. But we’re having fun. Peni wants to go see a janky tourist trap sometime tomorrow, so we’re probably gonna do that. Then, I don’t know. As long as it takes us to get to the lake, or until the week’s over.”

“Penny?”

“Oh. Friend, part of our group. Um, she’s this girl, not from Visions, couple years younger than us, but you wouldn’t know it; crazy smart, very funny, you’d really like her—”

“I gotcha. Friend of yours.” His dad is gentle.

“Yes.” He shuffles his feet. “Um. Everything okay at home?”

“Yup. Or, well, I’ll let you know when I get there.” Huff of breath. “Your mother misses you.”

“She does, huh.”

“I — oh, stop. I miss you, too.”

“Okay.”

“And, uh, we’re looking forward to seeing you. But it’s good that you’re having a good time. You know, no rush.”

“Thanks,” he says. He contemplates, briefly, telling him about Officer Stacy. Maybe — but they’re so close to the finish line. This is going so well.

He’ll tell him another time. It’s fine. It’ll be okay. He doesn’t need to ruin this.

“I’ll see you soon,” he says. “Um. Love you?”  _Why did you say it like a question, oh my God, it’s not a question. Idiota, sabes como hablar?_

“Love you, too, Miles,” says his dad, sounding pleasantly surprised. “Good night.”

“Night.”

Miles ends the call. 

A chill settles in, and he presses his shoulder against the hull of the van, still warm from baking all day in the sun. It went well, he thinks, but that doesn’t explain why he feels so tired, as if he just ran two patrols one after another.

There is so much that he just doesn’t tell people.

There’s so much of Spider-Man that he still can’t tell his dad. And there’s so much of Miles Morales that he can’t tell the others. One foot in, one foot out. Recipe for getting hurt when the door swings closed.

“Miles?”

He jumps. Literally, unfortunately, meaning that he ends up stuck to the side of the van, blinking down awkwardly at one bemused and smiling Gwen Stacy, standing beneath him with her hands in her pockets.

She quirks one eyebrow. It’s blistering.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi.” She has to incline her face to talk to him. “Sorry to scare you.”

“You didn’t. Scare me, that is.”

“Right.”

“I saw a bug.” That isn’t better.

“I figured the sixth-sense would have let you know I was coming,” she says.

“Only works for danger,” he mumbles, clambering down from the side of the van.

“It doesn’t think I’m a threat?”

“You’re a threat, all right,” he tells her, and she cracks a grin.

“Fair enough. I came to tell you the food’s here.” She stabs her thumb over her shoulder. “I told them to wait for you, but I don’t think any of them are gonna do it.”

“That’s okay. I had to, uh, finish up out here.”

“Was that your dad?” 

He gives her a certain look out of the corner of his eye, and she flushes. “I mean, sorry. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. I just happened to hear, when I came out — and then I ran out of earshot, so I wouldn’t.” She points at the field behind the restaurant, where a vast abyss of cornstalks wave ominously in the moonlight. “I went out there.”

“It’s no big,” he says, somehow, though he’s privately recovering from a minor coronary at the idea she might have heard. “It’s chill if you heard.”

“So it was him? Your dad?” She leans against the van beside him, her arms crossed. He folds his own in the same way.

“Yeah.”

“How’d it go?” Her question is cool, undemanding, casual. It doesn’t ask for more than he’s willing to give.

“It went… really well.” He tips his head back to hit the van with a small thud. “Actually. Really, really well.”

“Miles, that’s awesome.”

“Yeah.” He clears his throat. “We’ve been on a good streak lately.”

“Does he know…?”

“He knows I’m here.”

She nods. “And with us?”

“He knows I’m here with you,” he says, tactfully. “And Peni, now.”

A tiny snort of a laugh. “Who else does he think we’re with?”

“Your dad.”

A non-tiny snort, this time. “Slick.”

“I had to give him a name, and Peter—”

“No, that’s absolutely fair.”

“I’m sorry. I hoped you wouldn’t mind.”

“I don’t,” she says.

“Oh, good.” He nudges her foot with his. “Who does your dad think you’re here with?”

She rolls her shoulders in an aggressive flex of muscle that he realizes belatedly is supposed to be a shrug. “He doesn’t.”

Miles blinks. “He doesn’t…”

“Know who I’m with. Or where I am.”

“Gwen…”

“Don’t,” she snaps. He retreats. This is a dance they do carefully, slowly, one at a time on very black ice.

“Sorry,” she says, after a moment. “Working on that.”

“I know.”

“He knows I’m with friends. And that I’m safe, and that it’s not… work-related.” The word trips on its way out and slurs the rest of the way through, hurried, ready to be over and done with. “Nothing else.”

“Does he want to know?”

Another shrug. “Maybe. If he does, he can always ask.”

Miles is quiet.

An owl croons low and lonely in the distance. The moonlight spills over the cornfields andturns it into a silver sea. 

“You know,” he says, “you should meet my parents.”

Gwen splutters.

“Not like that! I mean, maybe…? No, but not, I didn’t mean it like that, this time, I just meant, in the general way, like, they’re curious about you, and I think maybe you would like them? My mom reads a lot, and you two could talk about that, or other girl stuff, maybe? And, you know, my dad would definitely lecture you about the youth vigilante thing, I mean a big lecture, like sit you down in The Armchair and make you drink some tea and make you listen to his speech about pushing yourself and knowing the risks and managing your time correctly. And then he’ll give you a second, even longer lecture about rules of evidence and procedure in the criminal justice system, which is actually, uh, really complicated, I don’t know if Peter ever — um, but once he’s done that, I think he’d like you. And you’d like him.” This he says with more confidence than anything before it, because: how not? His dad is great.

“That,” says Gwen, “sounds very nice.”

“Good,” he says. “Come over sometime.”

“I will.”

She sucks on her cheek. He stares at his foot on the pavement, where it sits a few inches left of hers.

A punch lands on his shoulder. Hard. Hard enough to bruise, if he were a normal person. He yelps and massages the spot. “ _OW!_ Gwen, what the—”

“Thanks,” she says gruffly. “Now come inside already. My food’s probably cold by now, thanks to you.”

“My arm hurts.”

“Blame your spidey-sense,” she calls, already halfway to the door. She turns around in the doorway and smirks at him, and the diner light silhouettes her in pink, like stadium lighting, a nineties rockstar cutout in leather and jeans. Shades of Annie Lennox. Her grin is a lit match.

Miles shakes his head, snorts, and jogs to catch up with her.


	3. disc three

Miles sleeps through most of Illinois, curled in a knot in the far-backseat with Noir’s trench coat draped over his shoulders and one of Peter’s sweatshirts balled under his head. Peni, who stayed up sharing music with him until two, flatly denies any share of the blame and sneaks more than her usual tithe of Noir’s coffee. 

They’re shuddering across the border into Indiana when his head surfaces over the headrests in an enormous yawn. “G’m’nn,” he mumbles, and scrubs a bit of drool off his chin. “Ugh.”

“Morning, sunshine,” Peter chirps. “Have a good nap?”

“Pff. Mm-hn. Wh’r we?” He rubs his knuckles into his eyes.

“Does anyone else know what he’s saying?”

Miles stretches. His spine makes a sound like a popcorn bag three minutes deep in the microwave. “Where are we?”

“Bout two hours out. You just missed St. Louis.”

“I wanted to get a photo webbing the arch,” Peni says, “but I was outvoted.”

“We’re trying to keep a low profile.”

“Quitter talk!”

“Breakfast,” Gwen says, and tosses him a paper bag. Inside is a chocolate donut, still mostly warm, two bananas, and a protein bar. “We stopped while you were asleep.”

Miles peels one of the bananas and eats it slowly while he wakes up. The cornfields have given way to forests, and a tangled wood nestles up against the road. Frills of fluffy oak trees sprawl like mounds of emerald cotton on either side of the two-lane road. The car rattles over patches of weathered, pale asphalt streaked with chipped yellow paint.

“Where are we,” he asks, “specifically?”

“God knows,” Peter says, with the unwarranted confidence of someone under the impression he was giving an actual answer. “Missouri? Arkansas? Kansas? I just go where the fancy GPS points me.”

“Arkansas is about two hundred miles south of here,” Gwen says, with an indulgent mixture of annoyance and amusement.

“Cut me some slack, this isn’t even my dimension.”

“And you think we might have moved Arkansas?”

“Bold of you to presume I know where Arkansas is in the first place.”

Miles finishes the banana and hunts around for somewhere to put the peel. “Does anyone have a garbage bag?”

“Just toss it out the window,” says Gwen.

“I’m not going to litter!”

“It’s biodegradable.”

Miles eyes the peel doubtfully. “It could pose a disruption to the native ecosystem.”

“You’re a disruption to the native ecosystem.”

“I need to pee,” Peni announces, which has the side benefit of cutting the conversation to a blissful halt.

* * *

They stop at a gas station a mile down the road. The 7-11 is covered in a fine characteristic layer of tack and grime, but Peni bobs in and out of the bathroom without complaint, and Miles and Gwen go in to stock up on refreshments.

It’s a pretty empty day. There weren’t many people on the road, and Miles can’t imagine there’s much business even on the busiest times of day. The cashier leans with his chin in his palm on the counter, scrolling glassy-eyed through his phone. He barely glances up to grunt when Miles and Gwen come in. Country music twangs in tinny refrains from the overhead speakers. 

Gwen picks up a pack of gum and wanders off to the magazine rack. Miles slips on his headphones and drifts over to the coolers, debating between brands of lemonade. He taps on the side of his headphones, bopping his head kind of absently, not paying all that much attention to anything in particular. Remnants of drowsiness cling to the corners of his brain like a sheet of cobwebs, numbing his senses.

The guy in at the register’s taking kind of a long time. He’s talking in a low voice to the cashier, hard, the words indecipherable but the tone very much not. The cashier is a pimply redhead who desperately wants to be anywhere but here. Miles glances sidelong at the customer, thinking: Really, dude? 

That’s when he sees the gun.

Because of _course_ there’s a gun. 

Held silently and firmly low to the counter, mostly concealed by the guy’s sleeve, is a snub-nosed pistol that the cameras won’t catch and whose silhouette won’t press out of a pocket. Nothing flashy. Something you could dig out of a grandmother’s attic, if you had a certain kind of grandmother. Still very much a gun.

The cobwebs get gone real fast.

He turns back around with a quick little pivot on his heel and scans the reflection of the store in the freezer door. There’s a guy he didn’t notice by the slushy machine wearing a green bomber jacket. He’s been standing there without doing anything for almost a minute. Keeps touching his right hip. Packing heat, then, but he’s either not used to it or he’s nervous, which means amateurs, which means panicky, which means likely to run.

Civilians: two. The current cashier and the teenage employee who’s been in the bathroom, presumably smoking her lunch break, for the past twenty minutes.

Gwen’s still at the magazine rack, flipping through some glossy number with a goth band on the cover. A faint _tish-tish-tish_ comes from her headphones, so he knows she can’t hear him, and won’t, even if he speaks. He can’t raise the alarm, though. See: amateurs, see: easily scared, see: if scared, will shoot.

So he tries to think of how to get Gwen’s attention without either yelling or saying something that’ll give him away, because, again: gun. Spider-Man has a pretty cool power set. Being bulletproof ain’t part of it.

Slowly, moving with an exaggerated casual slouch, he saunters away from the freezer. He keeps nodding as if his music is playing, though it’s not. The gunman is still talking to the cashier, his back turned on the aisles, and Miles ducks below one as soon as he’s safely out of peripheral range. 

He turns invisible with a cool ripple, like stepping beneath an air vent.

Gwen doesn’t so much as flinch when he puts his hand on his shoulder, but a rigid line rises in her neck from the effort. Her hand stills on the page. She starts to look up, and Miles whispers, “Uh-uh.”

“Situation?” She says this so quietly he almost misses it. To boot, she masks the question under a noisy rustle of the magazine. He is _giddily_ happy with her, for a second, for somehow understanding exactly what he’s doing, and why he’s doing it, and always knowing what he means.

He leans in to her ear. “You remember that weekend Peter and I tried to get you to watch anime?”

The hard line in her neck disappears, and an even harder one appears in her mouth. “Miles. If you came over to talk about—”

“You remember the opening to Cowboy Bebop?”

She frowns. Then she stops frowning. Then she smiles.

“Dumb,” she says, and drops to the ground.

Because he’s still invisible, Miles allows himself a small, self-satisfied grin. Then he turns around and walks up to the guy at the register. Taps him on the shoulder.

The gunman twists without moving the gun. He squints, with the deep bemusement of a limited intelligence grappling with an unfair presentation of evidence, at the place where Miles’ face should be.

Miles steps to the side and politely taps him on the other shoulder. The gunman’s face turns a really funny shade of reddish purple. His head whips from one side to another wildly.

“Hey, Rod,” he says, “that ain’t funny.”

“What?”

“This ain’t time for joking. Don’t _do_ that, man.”

Rod finally pulls himself away from the absorbing labels on the slushy machine. “I’m over here,” he says irritably. “What the hell—”

Gwen drops down from the ceiling and kicks him in the head.

Miles loves watching Gwen fight. It’s one of his top ten favorite activities, ever, partially because he’s a sucker for good choreography, but also because it’s intensely, viscerally satisfying to watch someone who’s very good at something just _be_ good at it. Plus, it’s Gwen. Obviously.

She webs the wall and hauls herself towards it, does a swimmer’s flipturn off the window and launches herself back at the second gunman. She webs him — wrist, wrist, chest — and vaults over his head, spine a perfect gymnast’s rod, lands on her feet and slides before grounding herself. The threads go taut, and then _he’s_ the one sailing across the room, gun tumbling forgotten from his hands, until he hits the opposite wall with a sound like a wet sack of rocks being making a long drop onto pavement.

The first gunman, recovering quickly from his shock at watching a fifteen-year-old girl lob his partner around like a hacky sack, wheels his gun around, and no, Miles decides, that won’t do.

He knocks the wrist off-course with a neat, snappy punch that May would’ve been proud of, grabs it with his off-hand, and venom-strikes. Electricity pulses under his fingers like an extension of his heartbeat, a gentle buzz against his palm, an echo of a static shock.

The scream that the gunman lets out is mostly surprise. It’s also somewhat disproportionate. Miles didn’t really juice the guy, just gives him enough to rattle him — and to make the muscles of his hand spasm, at which point the gun drops into Miles’ hand.

Feeling bold, he phases visible. Then he flips the gun around in his hand and points it at the floor, because his dad is always yelling at the guys in movies who don’t use proper firearm safety.

“Hey,” he says brightly. The gunman screams again. “Aw, c’mon, man, I’m not that ugly.”

He probably recognizes the adrenaline surge before the gunman does. Jittery nerves and a bad shock will make a guy do stupid things, especially one who’s already on edge because he’s an amateur, and maybe that’s a little bit on Miles, for taking the path with the most dramatic flair instead of the one that would have de-escalated the situation. Oh, well. _C’est la vie_. 

He catches the right hook in his hand, twists, pivots hard to the left and downward. It’s a sloppy punch, and it left the guy off balance, so when Miles tugs, he stumbles forward easy, barely catching himself on his right foot before Miles knocks his leg out from under him.

Faceplant on a linoleum floor. Not a good landing. Miles winces, sympathetically, and drops to his knees.

“Stay down, man,” he advises. “We’re not gonna hurt you.” He pauses. “Well. I’m not. My friend definitely broke, like, eight of your buddy’s bones, minimum, so you should be glad you got stuck with me.”

“Please, I’ve got money, you can take it, you can keep the gun.”

“Bro, I cannot explain how much I do not want your lame granny gun. Or any gun!”

“I have money. Do you want money?” Is he crying? Miles feels kind of bad.

On the other hand: gun. Also: cashier, still there, and looking very frightened. Miles feels less bad.

“Nah, I’m just messing with you, dude. Hey, Gw— Widow,” he says, standing. “I need a web cuff for this guy’s hands.”

“Why can’t you do it?” Gwen is busy trussing Rod up like a turkey in the doorway. He hangs limp from his cocoon of silk, his gaze distant and firmly concussed.

“Left my webshooter in the car.”

She glances over her shoulder, and takes in the whole scene, from Miles to the gun to the guy on his belly with his hands over his head. “Showoff,” she says, though she doesn’t even try to sound unimpressed.

“Hey, I can’t help it if I’m good.”

“You’re holding the gun wrong,” she says flatly, which successfully banishes any remaining sense of inflated ego.

“I knew that,” he says, hurriedly putting the gun on the counter.

She rolls her eyes. “Hold your hands out,” she tells the guy on the floor. He lifts them over his head, and she webs them with a well-placed shot.

“Spider-Woman?” says Miles’ gunman, understandably dazed.

Miles chokes on a guffaw. Gwen freezes, blinking owlishly, and then webs the man in the face. A white gob of webbing smacks him in the eyes with such force that his head rolls back.

“Nice one, Space Cowboy.”

“Shut up! I didn’t have my mask on me!”

“Okay.”

“I panicked!”

“Oh? Couldn’t tell.”

“Shut up! Again! Why didn’t  _you_ knock him out?”

“I prefer de-escalatory tactics to the outright use of force,” Miles says loftily.

“Shut up. That’s stupid. You’re stupid.” She drops Rod to swing from his ceiling-hook and stomps out of the store. The automatic doors part for her in a comically normal whine of electronics.

“You gotta pay for the gum,” Miles hollers.

He gets a finger in reply. Two fingers, actually.

He fishes out a ten and hands it to the cashier. “For both of us,” he says. “Keep the change. Sorry about the mess. Call the police if you want, I guess? But also, to be real, if you wanna just let them go, I don’t think they’ll give you any trouble.” He starts after Gwen, but stops in the doorway. He bends and picks up the magazine she’d been looking at. “Hey, actually, do you mind if I take this?”

Slack-jawed and moon-eyed, the cashier manages to jerk his head infinitesimally from side to side.

“Great! Thanks. A su servicio, yada yada. Have a good one, man.” He fires off a salute and strolls out of the store, slipping his headphones back on.

* * *

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

“You have to be. That didn’t happen.”

“It did,” Gwen says, examining her fingernails. The paint is chipping, and she wipes a flake of blueish-black away with her thumb. “Can confirm.”

“Nobody has  _that_ kind of bad luck.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” says Miles. “We went in there and they came in and had guns. Granted, it seemed like kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing—”

“No, I mean, karmically speaking, it’s next to impossible. You’d have to like, kick puppies every day for ten years.”

“We can go back there and show you, if you want. We left them tied up. The cashier might have called the cops by now.”

Peter laughs. “I — okay — are you all _right_ , then? Did they put up much of a fight? We have a first aid kit in the back—”

“Please,” Gwen says, bored.

“It was quick,” Miles says. “One guy was pretty scared, and the other guy didn’t have time to do anything before Gwen threw him into a wall.”

She twists around to glare at him.

“Is he alive?” Peter inquires, clearly repressing a laugh.

“I don’t know, he was traveling at about Mach 5 when he hit the plaster, I think I saw some drywall come off—”

“It wasn’t that hard. I’m not reckless.”

Several throats are suspiciously cleared at once. She scowls.

“I’m not! It was a deliberate, calculated, well-timed—”

“Human catapult,” Miles agrees, nodding.

“He was threatening people,” Gwen says. “With a _gun_.”

“I’m just giving them the facts.”

Peter wheezes. “Of all the gas stations in all the rest stops in the world,” he says.

“What?”

“Never mind. Over your head. Noir, actually — no, never mind.”

* * *

About fifty miles later they take a right turn that parts them from the main road, and trundle up an unmarked and unpainted street which, although technically wide enough to admit two cars, leaves it entirely up to the cars in question to negotiate the passing. A few miles of that turns into crumbling asphalt, the kind that was paved once and then forgotten about for fifty or sixty years. A few more miles of that turns into dirt.

“Wait,” Peni says — now perched on her knees in the front seat, for navigational purposes — “now it’s saying we’re supposed to make a U-turn.”

“Here?”

“Yes. No! Wait. In fifty meters.”

“Where? There’s no room!”

“Well, then, back up, because it says we need to turn around. We missed the turnoff.”

_“What_ turnoff?”

“I don’t know, the turnoff-turnoff! The turn you were supposed to take and didn’t!”

“Why didn’t it tell me I was supposed to turn?”

“The signal’s not great out here, I guess it blipped out.”

“What happened to Wi-Fi?”

“It’s satellite GPS!”

Grumbling, Peter hauls the wheel around and executes a shuddering, inelegant U-turn. After four minutes going back the way they came, Peni says, “Um.”

“Don’t tell me.”

“Okay, so you can’t get mad at me.”

“I make no promises.”

“But you supposedly just passed the turn.”

Peter gestures aggressively at the wall of trees to either side of the car. “Oh, right there? The middle of the forest, right there? That turn?”

“I’m just reading what it’s telling me!”

“Does it want me to mow down a couple of oak trees first? Is that what it says? Where does it think we are?”

“It says that you need to turn left! That’s all I know!”

“Go fish,” says Noir. Ham draws from the pile, sighing.

“You look at that,” Peter says, jabbing his finger at the woods, “you look at that and tell me there’s a turn there, Peni. You tell me there’s a turn.”

“Maybe! I don’t know, turn around and keep going, maybe it’s further ahead.”

“You just said to make a U-turn!”

“Well, I don’t know! This isn’t my city, state, dimension, or _time period_ , I don’t know why you think I know my way around any better than you do!”

Peter flings the car into another gear, almost snapping the head of the gearshift off as he does it. “Fine. But if you tell me in five minutes that I need to turn around because I’ve missed the turnoff—”

“This wouldn’t be a problem if you had bought the trail map that lady offered at the rest stop.”

“Got any threes?” Noir inquires of Miles. Miles shakes his head and taps the deck.

“One,” Peter says, his finger aiming resolutely skyward, “that lady was a sketchy character, and she would’ve scammed the pants off all of us if I’d allowed it. Two—”

“Scamming? It was twelve bucks! To think! For the low, low cost of twelve bucks, I could have avoided this conversation!”

“Twelve bucks for a map is a robbery. I don’t expect you to understand this, Peni, because you’re from the future and our money probably doesn’t make sense to you, but anyone who wants you to pay that much for a paper map in the age of GPS is a stone cold crook.”

“If you weren’t such a cheapskate,” Peni growls, “we could be there already by now!”

Miles taps Gwen on the shoulder and holds up four fingers. She shakes her head, and he sighs, draws from the pile.

“The only reason I said no — aside from the fact that I’m not _made of money_ , like some people, apparently — is because I  _thought_ we had a working GPS!”

“She  _told_ us that there wasn’t any service near the lake! But no, you were all, ‘we’ve got special future technology, it’s probably fine,’ and all, ‘Oh, Peni can take care of it, hurr durr, I’m Peter Parker’!”

“I thought she was bluffing.”

“Bluffing! Bluffing? Why would she be bluffing?”

“She wanted us to buy the map! She had an incentive to lie!”

“Why would you even take that risk?” Peni demands, sounding near tears.

“Because we do not negotiate with terrorists,” Peter says firmly, and he slams on the brakes, pulling over to the shoulder. 

The force of it knocks the draw pile onto the floor, spilling a flurry of cards face-up, and a harmony of groans rises from the backseat.

“All right, that’s it. Kid, grab the book in the glove compartment,” Peter says briskly, climbing out of the car. “You’re about to become the only kid in the thirty-second century who knows how to use an atlas.”

They spread the atlas out over the hood of the car. Peni has to sit on the side of the hood to see over it, and Peter leans on his elbows, rifling his hands periodically through his hair until it puffs up like an angry cat. 

Noir shuffles the cards and deals another hand, which they play out until Miles catches Ham cheating. Then Ham takes the deck and teaches them card tricks, like how to flip a card in the middle of the deck and Blind Three Card Monte, and half a dozen ways to cheat someone blind at poker.

Midway through the afternoon, when Miles’ stomach starts growling and Gwen is so antsy he worries she’s going to take off into the woods, another car trundles up the dirt road behind them. The weathered pickup sports a crumpled fender, a cracked tail light, and more rust than red paint.

It slows to a halt beside their beached van, and Peter looks about a stone’s throw from dropping to his knees and thanking God.

A wide-faced woman with round cheeks and a blonde ponytail sticks her head through the passenger window. “Hey, stranger,” she says. “You’n your party try’na head by any chance to the lake?”

“Yeah,” Peter calls eagerly. 

“What’s the trouble?”

“GPS says we missed the turnoff.”

She hoots and smacks the side of the car. “Well, shoot, I’unno what eedjit told it to tell ya to do that, cuz there ain’t no turnoff anywhere ten miles from here,” she says indulgently. “You gotta keep on down this road n’ cruise for twenny miles, take a left at the fork. Road puts ya right on the beach. Turnoff, hell.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No sir. I been coming here every weekend since I was old enough to drive. So’s Eddy.” She jerks her head at the driver, a middle-aged man with a shock of peppery black hair. He raises two fingers from the wheel in a subdued wave. “That fork’s the only way you’re gonna get to the lake, ain’t no other way about it. Can show ya, too, if’n you’d like to follow.”

Peni flings open her arms and mouths silent words to the sky. Miles takes seriously the possibility that he’s just witnessed her finding religion.

“That’d be fantastic,” Peter says hastily, scrambling to get back in the car. Peni doesn’t even bother with the door, just vaults the windshield and drops in through the sunroof. “That’d be so, so awesome, thank you, Miss—?”

“Aw, hell. Just Nancy, hon, none a’ that. Figgur it’s a’least we can do, can’t have any more tourists dyin’ up here.” She tilts her head back and lets out a broad belch of a laugh. “HA! Just messin’ witcha, ain’t nobody died up here. Most ever happened was one guy lost a leg, but he was one of them city eedjits who come lookin’ for bears. All right, this way.” She smacks the side of the car twice, and Eddy starts the engine.

True to her word, the road continues uninterrupted for the better part of twenty miles before branching into two clearly delineated forks, one traveling up into the hills and the other down further into the forest. Every so often Nancy sticks her head out of the passenger window and grins at them to check that they’re following. When they make the turnoff, she leans out as far as she can and flashes a thumbs-up.

“Anyone else get the feeling she kind of thinks we’re stupid?” Gwen says, after a while of this.

“Yes,” Peni calls back tiredly. “She’s right.”

The truck leads them down the uneven dirt road for another ten minutes, and then pulls up in a small bark-dusted lot that seems to be cleared for their use. Nancy hops out first, wearing a blue flannel shirt under a puffed vest and smiling like sunshine at the sight of them.

“Hey, you made it,” she says, as if there’d been moments when she had doubts. Peter parks the van and the others pile out in a crowd of wobbly legs and pins-and-needles feet. “Whoa! There’s more of you n’ I thought.”

“You know, we get that a lot,” Gwen mumbles.

“Well, who’s all this?” She plants her hands on her hips. 

“I’m Peter,” says Peter, “and this one’s Peni; that’s Miles, Gwen, and — um, his name is also Peter, but we call him ‘Noir’ for convenience’s sake — uh, and that’s…” 

Ham and Nancy both seem equally intrigued at how he’s going to stick the landing.

“Ham.”

Ham and Nancy examine each other. 

“Oink,” says Ham.

Nancy cracks a grin. “Hah!” She slaps her thigh. “If that don’t beat all. Weirdest pig I ever did see in my goddamn life, but I don’t judge.” Utterly unperturbed, she turns back to Peter. “You folks need any other help gettin’ settled? Cabins are just through those trees, an’ there’s an emergency phone booth ’bout a quarter-mile walk round to the campsite on the other side of the lake. You’ll wanna run up there if’n you need first aid s’well, they got stuff for that.”

“Thanks. Um, can I…?” Peter surreptitiously reaches for his wallet, and her eyes narrow. 

She smacks his arm, _hard_ , and Miles and Gwen both flinch. “Don’t you dare. I ain’t need any of that, and I know Eddy don’t.”

Eddy, who is methodically unpacking their gear from the bed of the truck, gives absolutely no indication of having heard any of this. When Nancy calls his name again, he turns his head ninety degrees, nods once, and returns to his task.

“Hell,” she sighs, “he don’t talk when he don’t have to, and God bless a man like that, ain’t enough of them, but it do get hard to introduce him to people, sometimes. Anyway. We’ll leave you folks to do your thing, but if there’s a problem, shout. We’re campin’ yay far round the south bank, a good hard holler’ll probably reach us.”

“We will, thanks.”

“And tell your friend with the dark hair he can shout even if there  _ain’t_ a problem.” She winks.

Noir, who has wandered off by the tree line to enjoy the fresh air, appears perfectly oblivious to this, and to the frantic double-takes it elicits from Miles and Gwen.

“I… will. Do that.” Peter would have sounded less dazed, Miles suspects, if someone took a two-by-four to the back of his head.

“A’right. You folks git on, now.” She slaps him on the shoulder, and sends the rest of them a sunny wave, and then goes off to help Eddy with their gear, calling: “Ed-dy _Yang_ , you fool son of a gun, now why’d’ja try and go carryin’ that all by yourself?”

Peter waits for them to disappear off the southern edge of the parking lot, and then beckons Peni. “Hey,” he says quietly, drawing two twenties out of his wallet. “They left the window down in the truck. Do you think—”

“On it,” Peni says, and hops up on the truck door. She clambers over the open window and slides easily into the front seat.

Noir drifts back to the group, holding a small cluster of wildflowers. “I picked these from the woods,” he says, lifting them for collective admiration, and even Gwen has to admit they are very nice. “As thanks for the people who helped us. Are they still—”

“No,” Peter says suddenly, and then, visibly, gentles himself. “Uh. You know what, why don’t you leave those with me, buddy, and I’ll give them to her.”

“I don’t understand.”

“And you’re a happier man for it,” Peter says firmly, taking the wildflowers, and slaps him on the back. “Don’t worry about it, buddy. Why don’t you go grab the cooler, get us started.”

Peni climbs back out of their car, shimmying through the window and dismounting with a neat hop. “Under the visor,” she says briskly, to Peter’s inquiring look.

“Good job.” He offers her a fist, which she dutifully taps.

“Naturally.”

“Hey, guys,” Ham calls, from somewhere in the woods. “Come take a look.”

They pick their way through about a dozen meters of woods, stepping in and around thatches of underbrush. By and by the growth clears, and then gives way to a long, wide white crescent of beach, pressed snugly up against the forest like the quick of a nail. Lapping at the foot of the beach is the blue-glass plate of the lake, wide and open and clear, a perfect oval of water under an identical oval of sky. 

Pine trees feather the hem of the lake, creating a faint rim of green between the two wide plates of blue. In the distance, a metal fishing boat bobs up and down, so small Miles could fit it in the lens of his pinched thumb and forefinger. There’s a ringing in Miles’ ears, and it takes him a second to realize it’s not sound, but the absence of it. Brooklyn is many things, but it is never, ever, ever silent.

Peni whoops. The sound gallops across the water and bounces off the sky.

“Cool,” she says idly. Then she kicks off her shoes and runs, her heels kicking up little bursts of sand, arms pumping, and leaps bodily into the lake.

The resulting splash snaps the surface tension on the water and ricochets like gunfire. She surfaces with her black hair slicked down, spitting water, cackling and flapping her arms like a kingfisher. “Come on,” she shouts. “I — come on! It’s not cold! It’s not,” she hastily corrects herself, “ _that_ cold.”

Ham shrugs. “Might as well,” he says, and vaults himself into the water with an Olympic dive. When he comes up, he spouts a stream of water at Peni, which makes her squeal and flail her arms in an attempt splash him back.

Miles looks encouragingly at Gwen. She gives a small smile and leans against one of the trees. “Go ahead,” she says. “I’m tired.”

“Really? We just sat in a car for three hours.”

She shrugs. “I didn’t get much rest.”

Miles dithers, trading glances between the water and the shade. Noir, having summarily divested himself of his trench coat, suit jacket, waist coat, tie, and socks, folds each item and settles them in a neat tower by the trail next to his spats. Dressed only in slacks, shirtsleeves, and suspenders, he wades into the water, his arms spread wondrously like Leo DiCaprio in _Titanic_.

Peni crows and launches herself at him, knocking him backwards into the surf. When they come up, he picks her up and vaults her into the water like a human potato sack, eliciting a high giggling scream of _“No no no no no!”_

“Go, Miles,” Gwen tells him. “I don’t need a babysitter.” She smiles to soften the remark’s edge.

“Okay. Come in if you change your mind.”

“Sure.”

He spins and runs after the others, stripping off his shirt and kicking off his shoes en route, and dives into the water.

The lake is a bracing shock of cold, but it’s a warm, sticky day, and it feels like balm, like aloe on a bruise, like the first breath of fresh air after hours without oxygen. Miles sinks into the water and feels the sweat washing away, leaving him malleable and pliant and woozily comfortable. With a single stroke, his head breaks the surface, and he blinks water out of his eyes in time to see Peter careen off the tiny dock in a sloppy cannonball.

Water sloughs off the impact site like a shaving from a knife. The wave crests over Peni and Noir and then soaks them, leaving them spluttering and shaking their heads. Ham, reclining in sunglasses on an air mattress, opens an umbrella produced seemingly from nowhere to shield himself. 

“Jerk,” Peni shouts.

Peter surfaces and grins. He spurts water through a gap in his front two teeth.

“War,” Peni announces. “War! Miles, come help.”

“Oh, no. I’m not getting involved. I’m neutral.”

“You’re dead to me!”

“You said that when I used up the shampoo this morning.”

Peni, having slung herself onto Noir’s shoulders to ride him like a battle mount, is steadily advancing on Peter. “Miles,” he calls, laughing and backpedaling quickly, “Miles, man, come on, come help a guy out—”

“Can’t. Dead,” Miles calls, floating on his back.

“Miles! You little sh—”

“Babies,” calls Ham, at a volume that successfully drowns out whatever else Peter was going to say.

Noir takes a swipe at Peter, and Peter dives, bobbing up again a few feet away and pedaling fast. Peni strips off her sock, dunks it in the water, and then hurls it at him, landing a perfect shot smack in the middle of his cheek.

Upon impact, Peter comically collapses into the water. He peels it off and drops it almost instantly. “Eugh! You little goblin, what even — what  _is_ that? That’s disgusting, ew, ew—”

“That’s justice!”

He snatches it up and punts it deeper into the lake, ignoring her cry of dismay. “Hey! That’s my sock!”

“And you  _threw_ it at me!”

Miles cranes his head up from the water and finds Gwen right where he left her, leaning against the tree. Her arms are folded over her stomach, almost protectively, and she’s watching the fight with an strange expression of distant affection, like someone watching a home video of a vacation from years ago.

He flips upright in the water and prowls closer. When he nears the beach, he crouches in the sand. She’s sufficiently interested in the water fight that she doesn’t notice him angling one wrist out of the water, squinting, and taking aim. 

She does, however, notice when the web latches onto the arm. 

Gwen jumps. Her expression, when she realizes what’s happening, is Shakespearian.

Before she can do much more than blink, though, Miles _pulls_ , and she goes skidding over the beaches, screeching and kicking to get a fruitless foothold in the sand.

With a shout of fury, she topples headfirst into the lake.

Miles releases the web and swims like hell.

He doesn’t make it far before a hand closes around his ankle and wrenches him underwater, and he gets a healthy mouthful of lake before he kicks himself free. Upon surfacing, he twists around, giggling, expecting to see Gwen spitting and splashing behind him, but there’s not a dash of blonde in sight. He ducks below the water again, searching, but the water is dim and thick and green, and he can’t see more than five feet in front of his face.

Miles strikes out for the others in a lazy crawl, alert. “Hey,” he calls, “have any of you seen Gwen?”

“Nope,” Ham says, now floating on a larger, even more elaborate air mattress. “Can’t say I have, kiddo.”

Peter, giving up all pretense of the rules of engagement, tackles Noir around the waist and sends Peni sailing from her makeshift mech. The colossal splash that follows makes it even harder to see, either above the water or below it, between the flurry of bubbles and churned foam.

“Gwen?” Miles calls.

No answer.

He pauses, waiting a few more seconds, and then sinks beneath the water again to give another look. She should have come up by now, right? To breathe, if nothing else?

He checks his watch. It’s been a minute at least.

“Gwen?” He raises his voice. “Gwen!”

He gasps for breath and dives, burrowing down until his fingers scrape the loamy silt at the bottom of the lake. Down here, the light is faint; brown fish nibble, light and friendly, at his wrists, and a carpet of silky moss clings to each stone. He pushes through the water, eyes blinking against the dim light and the water, his lungs slowly swelling with the effort of holding his breath.

A flash of platinum white glimmers at the edge of his vision. Miles’ heart does a raggedy syncopated skip, and he swims, frantically, because — because Gwen is floating at the _bottom of the lake_ , her back to the surface, her fingers curled limply in the water above her head. The light falls in eerie shapes over her motionless back.

Miles surges forward and grabs her wrist. A tug fails to move her. He grabs her under the armpits — and God, this is bad, this is really, really bad, he’s not CPR-certified, why didn’t he get CPR-certified, he’s _Spider-Man_ , how can he not know CPR — but he doesn’t know if Peter or Peni do, either, and he doesn’t know if it even exists yet for Noir, and Nancy said there was first aid stuff at the lodge but that’s on the other side of the lake and that’s almost half a mile each way, so it’ll probably take longer than four minutes round trip, and his Health teacher said that the human brain can only last without oxygen for four minutes before incurring lasting brain damage, and if Gwen gets brain damage then she won’t go to college and she can’t be an astrophysicist and win the Nobel Prize, and then it’ll be his fault that humans in her universe never to go Mars, or figure out what the hell dark matter is, which she told him about once but didn’t make a lot of sense and now it never will, and on top of all that now her universe won’t even have a Spider-Woman to make up for the fact that nobody’s going to Mars.

Miles hauls her upward with all of his strength, which is maybe too much, because it kind of unintentionally slingshots her through the water. He follows and catches hold of her again when she surfaces, pale and unmoving, and he starts hauling her desperately towards the shore.

“Peter,” he screams. “Peter, _help_ —”

Peter snaps to attention at his tone, splash war forgotten. “Miles?” He dives and splits the water with a surprisingly swift stroke, closing the distance between them in a matter of seconds.

“It’s Gwen, she’s not breathing, I don’t think, she’s not, she was under, at the bottom, I don’t—”

“Okay, calm down, deep breaths. Like we practiced, okay, one two three — I want you to do it with me — one, two, three. One, two, three—”

“But _Gwen_ ,” Miles wails, and it’s at that moment that Gwen roars to life, grabs his head in both hands, and dunks him solidly underwater.

When he comes up, Peter and Gwen are laughing so hard they have to lean on each other for support to stay upright.

“You,” Miles says, rendered speechless in shock and outrage.

“Oh, man,” Peter says, trying in vain to shield his face with his hand. “Oh, man. A classic. Miles, man, you rube, have you really never — oldest trick in the book — I remember Ben did that to me when  _I_ was your age, c’mon.”

“I thought you were dead!” He swims towards Gwen furiously, and cackling, she paddles away, putting Peter as a barrier between them. They circle Peter like a maypole, Miles in hot pursuit. “You  _jerk!_ I thought I’d drowned you!”

“Serves you right!” she says. “You ruined my favorite jean jacket.”

_“I thought you were dead!_ ” But he’s laughing, too, partly from sheer relief; the leaden pit in his stomach has evaporated into a fluttery pack of birds. “You’re a terrible person.”

“You are a terrible person,” Peter informs Gwen, who has scaled his back and is now clinging to his shoulders like a limpet in an attempt to escape Miles’ clutches.

“You laughed,” she shoots back, to which he shrugs, as if to say, _Point_.

“Get back down here,” Miles orders, swatting at her. “Get back down here and face the consequences of your actions.”

“No! Never.”

“Peter, help me out.”

“Hmm,” he says thoughtfully. “I don’t know. It was very funny.”

“Back me up, man! C’mon! I’m your heir! Spider-Men stick together!”

“That’s sexist,” Gwen says haughtily, over Peter’s shoulder. She ducks the splash that he sends at her, and it catches Peter in the face.

“She’s distracting you from the real point!”

“What is the point?” Peter asks philosophically.

“Dunking her!”

“Ah,” says Peter. “You should’ve said.”

At which point he reaches up and flips Gwen head over tail into the water.

* * *

They drag themselves out of the water when the shadows drag long enough on the lake to turn the water cool, and leave their wet clothes to dry on the porch of their cabin. The cabin only has one shower, so they have to take turns washing off the sand and silt from the lake.

For dinner they’ve got only a few leftover donuts and the remains of their Walmart trip, so Peter and Peni head out in the van around five o’clock for a supply run. The others settle into the cabin, which is a cozy log box with a jutting lip of porch and a pair of rocking chairs stationed faithfully outside the door. There is a modestly supplied kitchen, a petite lounge space with some threadbare wicker furniture, and two tiny bedrooms, all smelling of pine and grass and woodsmoke.

The afternoon drips past in sluggish, lazy, yellow drops. Ham sits at a table the corner, playing a bizarre alien variant of solitaire; Noir reclines in one of the rocking chairs on the porch, reading a book. Miles pulls out his sketchbook and throws down some line art, just abstract shapes from the past couple of days, to keep the memory clear. A sweet breeze steals off the lake and twists its way under the windows.

At half past four, Gwen emerges from one of the bedrooms. Her wet hair is pulled into a topknot, and she’s washed off the grimy remains of her makeup, leaving her eyes naked and clear. She’s wearing a pair of gym shorts and a white Midtown High sweatshirt. She takes in the quiet scene at a glance, and without speaking, she pads into the kitchen.

Miles sits up and pushes his headphones off one ear. She pulls down a stainless steel saucepan, fills it with tap water, sets it on the stove, and flicks on the burner. While the water boils, she sorts methodically through the jars in each cabinet until she finds a glass jar of black grounds. The spoonful she takes is leveled with the flat end of a knife and poured directly into the bubbling saucepan. One hand idly stirs the saucepan while the other goes hunting for filters, which she finds cruelly buried three rows deep on the top shelf; with an elegant lift, she goes en pointe, and deftly tugs it from the cabinet.

Humming, she’s so absorbed that she doesn’t notice Miles until he knocks twice on the refrigerator.

“Hey, jerk.”

“Traitor,” she answers smoothly, and they trade grins. “Do you want some?” She lifts a mug. The one she selected — presumably at random — bears a bright blue Supergirl design.

“No, thanks. I don’t drink coffee.” He frowns. “Ever? But also especially not at four in the afternoon.”

“Oh.” She flicks off the burner and dismounts the saucepan. “It’s, um. Old habit.”

“Finals week?”

“During the school year, I have this… nap schedule.”

“A nap schedule.”

“Yeah. Every four hours, you take a two hour nap, and then you don’t have to…”

“Sleep at night?”

She jerks her head in a way that means _Well, yes_. She pulls a kettle from the back of the stove and spreads a clean dishcloth across the lip. “It’s more productive.”

“Is it?”

“It’s scientifically verified,” she says, which is not an answer and is so defensive that he suspects she knows it. “Also, my metabolism is going to rip through this like tissue paper. I’ll be lucky if a cup lasts me an hour.” She tugs a hair tie off her wrist and binds the dishcloth in place. “Anyway. I’m trying to switch back to a… semi-normal sleep schedule, for spring break. As a treat.”

“A good decision.”

“But this is when my afternoon nap usually happens. So.” She spoons some of the bubbling coffee from the saucepan into the kettle. It stains the dishcloth dark ochre and leaves a small dusting of grains over the surface of the cloth. “Coffee.”

Miles giggles.

“What?”

“Your afternoon nap.”

She brandishes a spoon at him. It’s still more threatening than anyone else with a knife. “Take it back.”

“Nope.”

“It’s a perfectly normal strategy for teenagers and adults alike, there are a lot of cultures where naps are a staple—”

“Adoooooorable.”

“Shut up.” She goes back to transferring the water into the kettle.

“Is this how you normally make it?” Miles kicks one foot over the other and folds his arms, watching. She continues to patiently ladle spoonfuls into the kettle, one at a time, adding to the pile of grounds on the dishcloth.

She snorts. “I normally go to Starbucks.”

“Oh.” He ducks his head, chagrined.

She shoots him sidelong vanishing smile. “But,” she relents “this is how me and my dad did it. When we didn’t have a coffeemaker.”

“When…?”

“Before my dad got his job.” She picks up the saucepan and strains the last dregs of the water into the kettle, then moves it into the sink. She unpins the dishcloth from the lip of the pot, wrapping up the used grounds in a miniature knapsack, and dumps it into the trash.

“Oh.”

She grips the kettle and pours. Steam rises from her full mug. The kitchen smells of thick, smoky coffee.

“How long ago was that?”

She smirks. “Are you trying to ask when I started?”

“No.”

“Are you worried for my health? Because I can assure you my growth is fine.”

“I’m a curious person! I’m allowed to ask you things.”

She chuckles under her breath. “Two years ago.”

“Thirteen?”

“I don’t know why you act like that’s weird for our age. This is like, by far among the least reckless decisions I’ve made as far as my personal health goes.”

“I — fair enough.”

She lifts the mug to her lips and closes her eyes. When she brings it down, she doesn’t open them. “Before that, I made it for my dad,” she says.

Miles straightens up, then tries to look like he hasn’t. “I see,” he says, though he doesn’t.

“In the mornings. You know, after Mom — I guess you wouldn’t — I mean, it’s a good way to get someone out of bed.”

“I see,” says Miles, and does.

Birdsong weeps through the window. Cards shuffle quietly from Ham’s table in the corner, and Noir’s rocking chair creaks. The cabin is small and golden and full of light.

“My mom,” she says suddenly, “drank tea in the mornings. Black. Four sugars and some honey.”

“Uh-huh?”

“It’s easier to make than coffee,” she says.

“I figured,” says Miles.

Gwen dips her head. Bangs fall out of her topknot into her eyes. “Her name was Helen.” She nods to herself, once, sharply. “In case you didn’t know.”

“I… did not.” He scuffs his foot on the floor. She’s in white socks with a red stripe around the top, athlete’s wear.

She hums and sips her coffee. The door to the conversation gently and naturally swings closed.

Miles fidgets with the settings on his headphones. The silence eventually grows too heavy and snaps. 

“Hey, let me try some,” he says.

Her eyebrows spring to insulting heights. “Really?”

“Yeah, really. Gimme.”

“Are your — aren’t your parents against—?”

“Gwen,” Miles says patiently, “don’t be a narc.”

“I — well, fine, then, yeah, here. Go for it. Knock yourself out.”

He takes the proffered mug and takes a slow, small sip. He holds it on his tongue for a while, swishes it around, and swallows.

“Oh my God, it’s horrible,” he says reverently.

“Hey!”

“It’s disgusting. That’s one of the worst things I’ve ever put in my mouth. That is dirt.”

“It’s not that bad!”

“Handing this to me qualifies as a hate crime.”

“It takes a refined palate!” She snatches it back.

“Refined? Refined? From Mrs. PBJ- _M_? Is it something about you? Do you not know when food tastes bad?”

“Okay, never mind, you clearly don’t appreciate the delicacies—”

“We gotta get you some of my mom’s cooking, ASAP. I didn’t realize it was this bad.”

Gwen sticks out her tongue. Miles snorts a giggle.

It’s at that moment that Peter staggers in the doorway, red-faced, with arms full of groceries. “Hey, punks,” he calls, shrugging them down on the table. “Come unload the grub. Peni’s pulling both your weight in grocery cargo, and her head’s the size of your biceps.”

True to his word, Peni comes in with her own bag moments later, carrying enough chili cans to feed a small tribe of cowboys for a month.

“Guess what we’re having for dinner,” she crows.

“Peni’s having that for dinner,” Peter corrects. “The rest of us are having frozen pizza. By the way, do we have an oven? I thought we did, but I didn’t check.”

“We sent you for the basics,” Gwen says incredulously, setting down her mug. “How did you come back with half the store?”

“Tomorrow’s our last night, Gwenzelle. This is for our last supper.” He picks up a bottle of margarita mix and tosses it to Miles. “Stick that in the fridge, will you? Not for you, mind. That’s for members of the party age twenty-one and up.”

“What do we need with celery?” Gwen hefts the fresh stalks and sniffs them, suspiciously, as if she expects to find evidence of subterfuge in the leaves. “And olive oil? Are you—” She whirls on Peter suddenly, pale as a sheet. “Are you planning to _cook?”_

Peter pauses elbow-deep in a grocery bag. “You know, I don’t think I like your tone.”

“Oh Jesus, you are.”

“What would be wrong with that?”

“You can burn water. I’ve seen you use your toast as a writing utensil.”

“Maybe marriage changed me! Maybe I was waiting for MJ every night with a home-cooked meal on the table!”

“The bottom rung of your food period is takeout.”

“I will be making tomorrow’s dinner, Gwendolyn,” Noir announces, to Miles’ surprise and Gwen’s potent, obvious relief. “I often enjoy cooking for myself. It is a necessity when you live on your own.”

“Right,” says Peter, nodding. “Necessity. Right. Totally.”

“Since I will not be requiring any assistance, however, Peter will be free to abstain from the cooking process.”

“God bless,” says Gwen.

“You’re one to talk.”

“Shut _up_ , Miles.”


	4. disc four

The lake is almost empty when Miles goes out. A few fishing boats rest on the glass-top towards the southern edge, drifting idly on the surface, and a finger of smoke rises from the far bank where a group of campers have started their morning fire. Grey light strains through the trees. The cold morning air makes everything seem fragile and intricate, as if it will all melt at a touch.

He wades into the water up to his knees and dives. A shock of cold quickly fades to a thrum of heat under his skin as he adjusts. He surfaces, takes a deep breath, and strikes out for the middle of the lake.

He used to do this at Visions, in the mornings, when he got back after an overlong patrol too wound-up to sleep. The swim team starts its practice at seven-thirty, so for the hour or two before they filed in, Miles had the pool to himself, and he swam laps back and forth for however long it took to work off the extra adrenaline and sweat from the night before.

It was calming. He’d actually grown to like it, as a sort of morning ritual, although he’d stopped doing it after his dad scolded him for not getting enough sleep and he started trying harder to come back from patrols on time. Still, he sometimes misses it. The cleansing wash of cold, the instinctive lock and release of startled muscles, and then the weightless glide of cutting through the water. It was a more serene form of exercise than what he usually got.

He swims out to the center of the lake and floats. The morning sky spreads across his periphery. A flock of birds sings good morning to each other in the nearby trees. 

The quiet of the lake still gets to him. He keeps waiting for the toll of a car horn, or an ambulance siren, or for someone to lean out of a nonexistent eighth-floor window to swear at someone, possibly God. In theory, the silence is deeply settling and soothing. In practice, it’s unbearably lonely. He wants someone to come speed-walking out of the woods shouting into a bluetooth.

What are his parents doing, right now? What about Ganke? Are they safe, alone, in their own houses, enjoying an uneventful morning in New York? What are the headlines? Who’s making the news?

He flips over and cuts back to the shore.

When he picks his way out of the shallows there’s a figure waiting for him on the shore with a towel. Peter stands in his boxers and a ratty bathrobe that flickers behind him like a cape in the lake breeze. He’s not sporting a five o’clock shadow so much as a ten A.M. fuzz.

“Morning workout?” He sticks out a palm to help Miles climb out of the water. “Yeah, that’s what I’m doing, too. Just got back from a five-mile run around the lake. Gotta start the day right, you hear me?”

“Sure, man.”

“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, there’s breakfast. Eggs. Peni’s trying to get Ham to eat a piece of bacon.”

“That seems… morally wrong?”

“She’s arguing that it’s not technically cannibalism if he was born a spider.”

“I don’t think that’s the way it works.” Miles accepts the towel and scrubs down his face.

“I mean, the way she explained it,” says Peter thoughtfully, “it’s like, if a werewolf kills and eats another wolf on the full moon, and then turns back into a person, is he a cannibal? To which I think you have to say no, right? Logically speaking.”

“Assumes that you turn back into a spider afterwards, though,” Miles points out, draping the towel around his neck.

“That’s what Gwen said. To which Peni replied, and I quote, ‘That can be arranged.’”

He follows Peter up the beach. Inside the cabin, a hurricane of an argument rages at the table, peppered by shots of webbing and accusations, all orchestrated by its five-foot tall conductor, who directs the proceedings with a bacon-clad fork from atop her chair. 

Miles reaches up as he comes in and tugs down the strand of bacon that’s webbed to the light. He nibbles at it while he fixes his plate in the kitchen, mining out some of the mountain of scrambled eggs on the stove, and squeezes in besides Noir and Gwen at the table. He sips some of Gwen’s orange juice and tucks into his food. She doesn’t notice, being quite occupied making a violently eloquent point on vegetarianism.

Peter drops into a seat across the table and winks at him. The cabin is full of the smell of cooking grease and the sound of four perfectly intelligent people losing their minds. Miles hides his smile behind his hand.

* * *

“Truth,” says Peter.

Miles contemplatively twists his marshmallow over the flames. “Was MJ your first kiss?”

“No.”

Gwen, leaning back on her elbows, uses her foot to shove her marshmallow spear closer to the clothes. The fire crackles in its cage of driftwood, casting a ruddy pool of light on the sand. 

The remains of dinner lie strewn on dirty plates and emptied cups in a loose ring of detritus around the firepit. 

“Harlot,” she says. 

“Guilty as charged.”

“Somewhere out there there’s a girl walking around with Spider-Man’s virtue, and she doesn’t even know it.”

“Yes’m, there is. Harriet Tompkins, third grade. She broke my heart for two juice boxes and a Froot-by-the-Foot. I never loved again.” He pulls two marshmallows off with his teeth and chews noisily. 

“Love is often cruel,” Noir agrees.

“I remember Harriet,” Ham says fondly. “Black hair. Green eyes. Cutest little wolf spider you ever did see.”

“My version probably had fewer legs than yours,” says Peter.

“Your loss, my friend.”

Gwen tilts the spear out of the fire to examine the blackened shells of her marshmallows.“When did you meet MJ, then?”

“High school. We kind of knew each other before that, through family friends, but we didn’t meet officially until then. _You_ , on the other hand, were a thorn in my side long throughout middle school.”

“You’re welcome.” She crunches through the first of the blackened husks. “Isn’t it your turn?”

“Guess so. Noir, truth or dare?”

“I choose the truth,” he says, the fire casting bleak shadows over half his face.

“…Okay. Are you seeing anybody?”

Noir’s sunglasses make it difficult to read his expression, but despite this he gives an impressive rendition of a thousand-yard stare.

“He means going steady,” Miles supplies helpfully.

“Yes, I know,” he says. “Hmm.”

Peter holds up a hand. “Safe to say it’s complicated?”

Another pregnant pause.

“No,” he decides. “I think the answer is no.”

“…Elaborate?”

“No.”

“Spider-Man stuff?” Peter asks.

“It’s not your turn anymore,” Noir points out, and Peter relents with grace. “Gwendolyn. Make your choice.”

“Dare.”

Miles’ hand shoots up in the air.

“Miles. Your suggestion?”

He produces a packet of hot sauce salvaged from the remains of their dinner. With great production and fanfare, he bequeaths it to Gwen.

“Oh, give me that,” she sighs, and snatches it. She empties the packet onto one of her marshmallows and shoves the whole thing in her mouth, her expression impassive. She chews. She swallows.

“A new favorite?” Miles says.

“Don’t push your luck, Morales.”

“Okay.”

“Peni, truth or dare.”

“Dare.” Peni is busy maintaining a Rube Goldberg machine of multiple rotating marshmallow spears, involving an intricate pattern of layered-submersion at different temperatures to achieve the desired toastedness. With utmost focus, she lifts one from the fire like a glassblower drawing her finished sculpture from the kiln.

“I dare you to step on a coal.”

“Done,” she says, handing off the skewer to Noir. She kicks off her shoes and is halfway to the fire pit when Peter makes a vague but final disagreeing sound in his throat. Gwen sighs.

“Scratch that. Uh… try to do a backflip, or something.” 

Peni cracks her neck both ways and executes a neat handspring backwards, loosing little tufts of sand where she makes impact. She sticks the landing and spreads her arms, welcoming the light round of applause with a short bow.

“Okay, then,” Gwen says, impressed despite herself. “I… didn’t expect that.”

“Three years of gymnastics and a course of physical therapy as prep for the SP-DR program,” Peni says briskly, dusting off her hands. She kneels back down in front of her marshmallow roasting contraption. “Dad wanted me to get out of the house.”

Miles glances at Gwen, and finds her glancing back. They have a brief nonverbal conference — _Dad?_ — and decide not to say anything.

Peni claps her hands. “Miles! Truth or dare.”

“Truth,” he says easily, spinning his marshmallow to even out the char.

“Which Spider-Man do you think has the nicest butt?”

He rolls his eyes. “Me. Hey Peter, truth or—”

“Not fair! You have to answer the question in the spirit it’s asked,” Peni says indignantly. “I demand a redo. Judge?”

“Granted,” Peter says generously. “Miles, gun to your head. Best butt. Come on.”

“I don’t — I’m fourteen, I shouldn’t have to answer this question.”

“I’m twelve, and I asked it,” Peni says.

“ _Almost_ fifteen,” Gwen drawls.

“No! I plead the fifth.”

Peter’s eyebrows move in ways that they should not. “Does that mean your answer is especially self-incriminating?”

“You know what — just for that, I’m picking my universe’s Peter. It was him. He had the best one. You’re all disappointments. Waste of a skintight suit.”

“Judge,” Peni whines.

Peter holds up a hand. “Miles has technically provided a valid answer to the question as posed,” he allows, “but it was a cheaty answer, and also a lie, since the correct and only answer is ‘Peter B. Parker.’ ‘Noir’ was also acceptable, being the closest genetic match. For this infraction, Miles must answer an additional question.”

Peni crows, ignoring Miles’ cry of injustice.

“This is favoritism,” Miles grumbles. “The system is broken.”

Gwen snorts. “Where was this energy when I had to answer four questions about my middle school haircut?”

Peni shuffles up on her knees excitedly. “Who do you think has the best costume?” she demands. “ _Besides_ you.”

“I... Huh.” He tilts his head, thinking. “Hm. I actually think Noir’s is pretty cool? Not my thing, really, with the bomber goggles and the knee-high boots, but I think it’s the best design. Like, in terms of aim and execution, it pulls off the effect it’s going for, which is — I think — just to be as scary as possible?” He looks at Noir for confirmation, who nods. “Yeah. Good silhouette, right amount of detail. Oh! It’s easy to replace any of the parts, if they get damaged? Which is really good? If my suit tears, I gotta sew it up myself, but Noir can just … buy some new pants? That’s smart design.”

Peni huffs. “I pilot a _literal_ mech, Miles.”

“Okay, but your actual costume is just your normal outfit.”

“The mech counts!”

“Mech is cool! Smart design choices are cooler.”

“You just like it because it has a cape,” she sulks.

Miles refuses to be shamed by this. “Capes _rule_.”

“Capes get tangled with the web,” Peter recites, sounding bored.

“ _He_ does it.”

“I don’t really use the webs,” Noir informs him, by way of comfort. “The smog makes it hard. You run into a lot of walls.”

“I know! I know that! I do! I’m just saying.”

“He thinks it looks cool,” Gwen sighs. “The trench coat.” Miles pinches her arm, and she swats his hand off.

“Miles, would you like a trench coat?” Noir asks curiously. 

“…Are you asking for real.”

“I am asking sincerely, yes.”

“…I might.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Why do you ask.”

“I have a guy.”

“You have a guy,” Miles repeats. “He has a guy,” he tells Gwen, gleefully.

“I did hear that, yes.”

“I — okay. Sorry. That’s… yeah. Anyway. Is it my turn?”

“Think so.”

“Um, Ham. Truth or dare.”

“Truth,” Ham yawns, poking at the coals.

Miles, at a loss, makes a gesture to the others that opens the floor.

“Are you more attracted to pigs, or spiders?” Peni asks. “If you had to choose.”

Ham slaps his thighs and rolls to his feet. “On that note, I’m gonna call it a night, fellas,” he says brightly. “I’ve gotta get my nine hours of beauty sleep.”

“Yeah, that’s fair,” Peter says, with an exasperated glance at Peni. She shrugs, snickering.

Ham brushes the sand off his pants and salutes. “Good night, folks. If there’s an emergency and you need my help, call someone else.”

“Will do,” Gwen says, amused. “Goodnight.”

A round of goodnights fire off from around the campfire, and Ham goes waddling into the dark towards the cabin.

“I should go, too,” Noir says suddenly. Miles doesn’t understand until he looks at Peni, who’s scowling, but nevertheless rises when he does. 

“It’s only eleven-thirty,” she says.

“That’s very late in 1933.”

“That’s not how time works.”

“It is in my universe.”

“That’s not how universes work, either.”

“Except in the universe where it is.”

Picking their way back to the cabin, their voices fade into the low crackle of the fire and the gentle gurgle of water on the lake. Peter leans forward as far as he can without actually moving himself and pulls Peni’s last marshmallow spit from the fire.

“What time are you thinking of leaving in the morning?” Gwen says.

Peter shrugs. “No particular hurry,” he says. “Gotta be out of the cabin by ten. Figure we’d be on the road by nine-thirty or something, stop for breakfast on the way back.”

“Same route back?”

“Maybe,” he says. “It’s a toss-up. Might be nice to get a change of scenery. What, you got somewhere to be?”

“No,” she says, sounding oddly wistful. “I just wondered.”

Miles picks at the crusted shell of his marshmallow without speaking. He’d almost forgotten it was their last night. Between dinner and hiking and playing in the lake, and the fire and talking and everything being unambiguously _good_ , it just — it hadn’t come up.

It wasn’t like he’d forgotten.

“Miles?”

“What?”

Gwen speaks like she’s repeating herself. “You want shotgun?” she says, slowly and clearly. “Since I got it on the drive down?”

“Oh. Sure, that’s fine.” He peels another crusted strip from the marshmallow and lets it fall into the sand. “Maybe Noir would like it more, though. I don’t think he rode up there once all the way from New York.”

“That’s true. He didn’t ask.”

“Still.”

“You’re right. We can offer.” Gwen is watching him curiously, but whatever she wants to know, she doesn’t ask it. Which is almost worse than asking, really.

He takes a sharp breath and stands up. “I should sleep, too,” he says. “You — Peter, if you’re gonna drive, you should go to bed.”

Peter waves an airy hand. “I’ve driven on much less sleep than this,” he says.

“Uh-huh. What does that car look like today?”

“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

Gwen says, “I’ll get him to bed. You can head on back.”

Miles pauses, and then nods. Peter doesn’t object to this announcement, just rests his head on the sand and eats another one of Peni’s marshmallows off the stick.

“Good night,” he says, and gets two echoes back. He turns his back to the fire and makes the trek back to the cabin, fumbling for his phone flashlight in the dark.

The door is unlocked, and swings open at a touch. He picks his way through the cabin, tiptoeing around the supine form of Ham on the couch, and eases open one of the doors to the bedrooms with minimal squeaking. Inside, Peni has already claimed one of the beds — he assumes Noir, who he didn’t see in the living room, has taken one in the other bedroom.

Through the window, he can still see the fire guttering on the beach. The tiny forms of Gwen and Peter cast long shadows on the sand, and the wind carries faint echoes of their voices — too low to hear what they’re saying, but enough to catch the murmured current of their conversation. 

Miles worries that he’s getting too used to falling asleep with them around.

He tosses on a sweatshirt and climbs into the other bed. He puts on his earphones and switches to his sleep playlist, lies on his back, closes his eyes. He waits to fall asleep, and doesn’t. He rolls over onto his side, and doesn’t. He flips onto his stomach, and doesn’t.

He remembers hearing the creak of the door and a familiar duet of voices float in from the cabin living room. It’s the last thing he remembers before he sleeps.

* * *

When he dreams, it’s vague and mostly slipshod reconstructions of memories from the past few days. He’s dreaming of the inside of a car, of eighty-five miles per hour on an empty highway, of diving into a fresh, cold lake. There’s dialogue and things happen but never notable ones, and it’s all nice, in the same uncertain, dreamy way that the whole trip has been. It’s bland and benign and he won’t remember a minute of it come the morning. He never remembers his dreams.

But it’s always the same nightmare.

When he feels himself dropping into the scene, he almost sighs. He thinks: _All right, here we go_. Thank you, subconscious, you unoriginal hack. Take seventy-hundred and whatever. Let’s get this ball rolling.

Enter scene: exterior rooftop, day. Broken shingles littering a wound in the roof like lost teeth. White sky, bright, cold. Leaves in the gutter. Ugly crack-of-dawn September morning. Enter PROWLER, 6’1, male, black suit, claws. Enter SPIDER-MAN, 5’2, male, kid costume, socks.

[Enter MILES MORALES, hanging from a chokehold, begging. Enter AARON DAVIS, stricken, speechless, but not letting go.]

“Please, Uncle Aaron.”

(Uh, hello? Line? Line? Is that really all you can say?)

Whine of a hydraulic glove, rising shadow in the periphery of his eye. Aaron is glancing away from him, like he might forget, like he knows it’ll be easier when he can’t see. Even now, Miles thinks he might be able to get over it, to move on, if not for that. And the act that follows it, which is worse.

(Line? Line? Can we please get this kid a line that will stop his uncle from killing him, Jesus Christ? There has to be one, hasn’t there? He’s family, for God’s sake.)

Stage direction: PROWLER pulls Spider-Man mask down over SPIDER-MAN’s eyes.

Miles watches his uncle disappear as the mask comes down, and the fabric scrapes across his cheeks, and he feels like he’s suffocating, the polyester is wrapping around his face and choking him, and suddenly Miles knows, with a cold and unmoving certainty, that he is going to die — that he’s going to die on this rooftop, right now, on a cold September morning so very far away from home, with his uncle’s hand at his throat and a mask over his mouth, breathless, gasping for air. And he sobs, and sobs, and sobs, but he can’t, there’s no air, so he just makes soundless little convulsions in his throat, and tries to keep his eyes open, because as stupid, stupid, _stupid_ as it sounds, he feels better when he can see Aaron’s face.

(What do you mean, there’s not?)

Roof rises to meet foot. Release of pressure, gasp of air, shuddering sob. World spins from a sudden rush of blood to the head. Colors bleed. Focus in: PROWLER steps back, hands lifted. Surrender? Or ceremonial execution? But there’s a tightening in the lips, softening of the eyes; yes, that’s his smile, it’s coming, it’s going to wrap Miles up and hold him and tell him he didn’t mean it, and it’ll tell him that he loves him, and it’ll tell him that it’s going to be all right.

(Well, say something, then, ANYTHING, idiot, explain yourself, don’t just stand there, don’t just stare at him, if that’s what you’re going to do.)

(Kid, Jesus Christ, say something, we don’t have much time before—)

Gunshot.

Sound of a film reel, ripping. Sound of a record scratch. Sound of the last page torn out from the spine and fed through a shredder. Sound of Ben Parker lying on the sidewalk outside a bodega, sound of Gwen’s Peter hitting the ground, sound of Kingpin bearing down on a blond, blue-eyed grad student with so much to lose. Sound of the end that you never realized was coming until now, a distant train blaring while your body lies prone on the tracks, that horrible howl of pain and death and time. That’s the sound that the bullet makes when it enters your uncle’s body, burying deep in the heart that loved you, carrying him out of your arms and down to the dirty street where he died.

And there it ends. Aaron Davis lies in an alleyway, staring at Miles as if he’d rather take a second bullet to the chest than disappoint him, and dies thinking he had.

Cut. End scene.

Except Miles stays there for a while, in that shimmery dream-space where Aaron is somehow both dead and not, alive and not, sustained on the precipice of his last breath. This is where the nightmare likes to keep Miles, because:

(SAY SOMETHING, you coward, you pathetic useless runt of an excuse for Spider-Man, you stupid weak idiot boy, say something, your uncle is dying and he’s right there in your arms. Can you not provide him some comfort? Say that you forgive him. Please. Please, please, come on, Spider-Man, you can do it, he’s dying and you don’t have much time left, you have to say that you forgive him.)

He opens his mouth and wakes up.

The cabin is quiet and dark. A puddle of sweaty sheets lie tangled at the foot of the bed. Moonlight strains through the blinds, eerie and shock-white. Across the bedroom, Peni still sleeps, her faint snores cutting through the gloom.

He peels himself out of bed and stumbles to his overnight bag. At the bottom, beneath piles of crumpled sweatpants and spare tee-shirts, his fingers brush cool black fabric. 

Miles strips and changes quietly, by the light of the moon, and then leaves, slinging on his jacket. 

Paradoxically, the lake seems louder at night. The croons of frogs and cicadas circle the lake and make it hard for him to pick out movements in the forest, although distantly, the far ranges of his senses pick up rustles and murmurations of a human campsite a quarter-mile around the lake. Tiny beads of light peer across the water from the lodge on the other side. Moonlight spills across the surface of the lake like silver being poured from a crucible.

He webs himself up into the trees and wanders. His limbs want to move, so he lets them, swinging around the lake until he’s close enough to the other campsites to see the shape of their tents and the faint gleam of their bonfire embers. He hangs back in the shade of the trees, checking that everything’s all right. Then he swings back the other direction.

It’s harder to swing through a forest than a borough. For one thing, the trees aren’t arranged in any particular order, so it’s not as though there are any streets for him to swing through, or a skyline that he can crest when he wants a better view. He mostly has to make a series of coordinated jumps from tree branch to tree branch, using a web only when he can’t make the gap between one tree and the next. It goes better than his first time trying to use a web shooter in a forest, certainly, although it does feature a higher number of unpleasant altercations with birds.

He alights on the cabin roof and stands, the pleasant pulse of his heartbeat in his ears. The last vestiges of sleep fall away. He doesn’t feel like going back to bed, but he’s not as wired, anymore, and so he’s stuck in a weird space between his need for sleep and his desire to stay awake. 

On the one hand, he doesn’t want to wake anyone up by coming back in, but on the other, he doesn’t want to fall asleep on the roof. Seems like the kind of thing that might raise some questions in the morning.

Something light drops onto the roof beside him. He spins, two fingers on the trigger of his webshooter, and instead finds Peter.

He rises from the squat of his landing and flicks up his wrists. “Draw,” he says drily. Miles drops his hands, flushing.

A pair of tartan pajama pants drape over his bare feet, and his greying overcoat hangs cape-like from his shoulders. Red spandex peeks from under the flaps. Miles’ gaze flickers down to it at the same time as Peter’s falls on the flash of black under Miles’ jacket.

They regard each other in self-conscious mutual embarrassment for a long moment.

“Well,” Peter says, finally, “now I’m just disappointed in both of us.”

Miles struggles not to snicker. “Have you — have you seen that—”

“I have seen the meme, yes.”

Peter sets himself down on the roof with surprising grace. Then he flops onto his back and starfishes. He mimes zipping his lips, locks them, and offers the invisible key to Miles.

Miles rolls his eyes. But he takes the key, zips his lips, and tosses it into the lake.

“Looking forward to being back in the city?” Peter says, as Miles sits down.

“I dunno.”

“…A surprising answer. Don’t tell me you’ve gained a taste for the country air.”

Miles snorts.

“You’re not missing that corner bodega by your house? Coffee shops on every block? Theoretically functional public transit?”

“Man, c’mon.”

“What do you _mean,_ you’re not jonesing for the opportunity to run around and have guys in latex shoot superweapons at you?”

Miles bumps Peter’s elbow, chidingly, with the toe of his shoe. “Very funny.”

“I am. It’s true.”

“It’s just,” says Miles, “been a nice break.”

Peter nods. “I get you,” he says, without further explanation, and leans back.

The silence spreads out, and Miles grows fretful. 

“Not that I don’t like it,” he hurries to say. “I really do.”

“Mm-hm.”

“I mean, I miss it, and I love it, and. I don’t want to stop, or anything.”

“Which is an option,” Peter says evenly.

“But I don’t _want_ to,” Miles stresses, loudly.

“Sure. Even so.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to! It’s that I…”

“Feel guilty for wanting a break.”

Miles exhales, hard, into his knees. 

“No,” he lies.

“Good for you,” Peter says easily. “That’s very well-adjusted and reasonable of you. It’s a good attitude to have and cultivate, and it’ll save you a lot of unnecessary stress and strain on your relationships with others.”

Miles shoots him a look. He grins, all teeth.

“Man, shut up,” Miles mutters.

Peter lets this roll off his shoulders without so much as a reaction. “You should teach a seminar,” he continues. “Sell tickets. Hey, I’ll take five.”

“Man, shut _up_.”

“Okay.” 

He kicks up one knee and crosses his legs at the ankle, yawning. Miles perches his chin on his knees and closes his eyes.

“Mom and Dad are good about it,” he says, “but they don’t really — I mean, it’s hard.”

“Yeah,” says Peter. It might be a question. Miles isn’t sure.

“I feel a lot,” he says. It might be an answer.

There’s a clanking sound from the side of the cabin. Miles and Peter fall silent and look; Peter rises onto his hackles and creeps closer to the edge of the roof. He peers over the side, and then snorts a laugh, relaxing and dropping back into his seat. 

Noir emerges, cresting the ladder onto the roof. “Hello, boys,” he says, dusting off his coat. “Nice night for it.” His coat flares smoothly as he steps onto the roof, and Miles wonders, idly, if suaveness in his universe is some kind of physical force.

“Hey, Noir.”

“Couldn’t sleep?” asks Peter.

“I prefer the night,” Noir says, as a sleek glimmer of moonlight runs atmospherically across his sunglasses. Then, after a pause: “Daytime in your universes tends to be very colorful. It fascinates me, but it can be …extremely intense.”

“Oh,” says Miles.

“Peni says it’s something called sensory overload.” He puts his hands in his pockets and gazes out across the lake, the wind twitching his coattails.

Peter sets his teeth sympathetically. “Sorry.”

He shrugs. “It’s being handled. But it is still, as she puts it, a major dragaroni.”

Peter snorts.

Noir indicates the space next to Peter. “May I?”

“Yeah, sure, why not. Sit her down.”

He flips out his coat and folds himself down with a fluid boxer’s grace. “Are we discussing our backstories?” he inquires, conversationally.

“We… sort of. Obliquely.”

“May I share some of my own?”

“Sure,” says Peter easily. “Go for it, big guy, let her loose.”

He folds his legs. “When I first became the Spider-Man,” he says (“The?” says Miles), “I had to do a lot of ruminating on my uncle. He kicked the bucket real fast and real dirty, you see.”

“I’m sorry,” says Miles softly.

“It was strikebusters. Found him in an alley. Real messy. Powers that be got mad about organizing, didn’t like how it screwed with the bottom line. If you want to send a message, messy is the point.” He rubs his hands together, as if to warm them. “I was seeing that alley for a long time after I stopped looking at it.”

“I—”

“The thing I gotta do,” Noir says, philosophically, “when I get to thinking about it, is think about him standing there with me. I ask him: all right, fella, what do you want me to be thinking about right now? And Uncle Benjamin always says, ‘Not this.’” 

He puts his hand on Miles’ shoulder. “So I let it pass.”

Miles rubs his hand over his mouth. He lets Noir continue to rub his shoulder, because it feels nice. He doesn’t answer, and Noir doesn’t seem to expect him to.

By and by, Noir turns to Peter. “I think we have a guest,” he says, apropos of nothing.

Peter reflexively looks over his shoulder, and his eyes narrow. On cue, the back of Miles’ neck tingles, fring a benign heads-up to the brain. It’s hard to explain the difference between the spider reflexes for _danger_ and recognizing other Spider-folk; mostly, it just feels like a primal portion of the hindbrain pointing and shouting, _You! You! That’s you!!_

“All right, stranger,” Peter calls. “Up with you.”

More footsteps creak on the ladder. Then Peni surfaces over the edge, rubbing one eye from exhaustion. She makes to say something, pauses as if she has to sneeze, and then looses an enormous yawn that threatens to swallow her face.

“Not you, too,” Peter says.

Noir points at her with an attitude of abject betrayal: _J’accuse!_ “You promised.”

She whines, plaintive and guilty, behind her teeth. “I did get _in_ the bed.”

“Fraudster.”

“You’re up,” she points out.

“I’m an old man. You’re a pumped-up pint-sized whippersnapper.”

“You’re a hard-boiled wet smack of a two-bit gumshoe, is what you are, and you can’t tell me what to do.”

“No,” says Peter loudly. “No more thirties talk. No. One constant and relentless source of corny old-fashioned gobbledegook is my quota. It’s over my quota, actually, but he’s very polite, so I’ve generously allowed it, which incidentally is not an exception I can make for you, Peni—”

“Eat my shorts, you jingle-brained jobbie.”

“That was good,” says Noir, “but don’t be rude, or you’re headed straight back to bed.”

“Does that mean I get to stay?”

He gives an exasperated, equivocating up-and-down sigh in his throat. Peni, glowing with self-satisfaction, crawls over to curl up against his leg, smacking her head down on his knee for a pillow. With a long-suffering eye on the horizon, he allows it.

“I’m starting to think that my position as leader of this superhero team is in question,” Peter complains.

“Since when were you the leader?” says Miles.

“Since — since duh, that’s when! Since I was the first Spider-Man to come through the portal—”

“I think that was Gwen, actually—”

“Okay, first _classic_ Spider-Man, as in the O.G., Peter Parker brand-name version—”

“That’s sexist, man, you can’t just say that because you’re a dude—”

“I was the first one to meet Miles, which gives me seniority—”

“—as if the ‘real’ Spider-Man has to be a guy, those are some straight up rank assumptions, my man. For all you know there could be more Gwens than Peters in the Spider-Man business —”

“Okay. Okay! Point retracted.”

“And that also wasn’t you, by the way, that was my Peter.”

“Well, I’m the oldest.”

“Debatable,” says Noir, but Miles is already shaking his head.

“What kind of nonsense is that? Do you think that the oldest guy gets to be in charge? Do you think that’s why Professor X leads the X-Men, because he just happens to be old as dirt? Like, if they happened to stumble across an older mutant named Joe Schmoe, it would be all, ‘Thanks for the laughs, G, but we’re the J-Men now’?”

“That’s not where the X comes from,” Peni mumbles sleepily.

“I don’t have to take this from my subordinates.”

“No, I’m serious. If some janky eighty-year-old Spider-Man came out of a portal right now, would you just give it up to him? Is that what you’re saying?”

Peter reaches over and ruffles Miles’ hair, to unruly effect. Miles squawks at him with no measure of dignity whatsoever and beats away his hands.

“Watch yourself, kid, or strike two is a noogie.”

“I’m gonna tell MJ you’re mean to the youth,” Miles grumps.

“Buddy, we were married. She knows.”

More squeaks on the ladder. Peter heaves a sigh, and doesn’t even turn his head when Ham clambers onto the roof.

“Did I miss my invitation to the cotillion?” he inquires.

“No,” says Peter.

Miles says, “We’re having an impromptu rooftop lake stakeout.”

“Lakeout,” Peni mutters, slurring. “Lakestout. Slakeout.”

“Well, don’t mind if I do.” Ham wobbles over the roof with exaggeratedly unsure steps and plops himself in the cavity between Peter and Noir, somehow wedging himself into a space far slimmer than his volume should permit. “How are we doing, fellas? What are we up to? What’s the hot goss? The DL? The T-L-D-R? The four-one-one? The coffee?”

“Tea,” says Miles, pained.

“We’re talking about who gets to be the leader,” Peter supplies helpfully.

“Of what?” Ham asks, bewildered.

“Us.”

He blinks. “You mean the president?”

“No. Of our _team_.”

“I didn’t think we had a hierarchical power structure,” he says thoughtfully. “I pictured a syndicate? More of a united federation of sovereign powers without a centrally localized authority.”

Peter, like Miles, obviously has no clue how to react to this. He stares wide-eyed at Miles, who shrugs and mouths ‘I don’t know’ at him.

“What?” Ham says hotly. “I went to college, you know.”

Peter coughs and splutters, “All right, point taken, Thomas Jefferson. My point still stands. The Avengers have Captain America, the Justice League has Superman, and the Spider-Crew—”

“The what now?” says Miles, ecstatically.

“ _Working title_ , get off my back — has a leader. Even if for crisis situations only. As a reference point. For direction.”

“Do we?” says Noir, skeptically.

“Well, sure,” says Ham thoughtfully. “I just always figured it was May.”

Peter takes a breath, brandishes his finger, and then wilts with a profoundly exhausted expression of defeat. 

“Yeah,” he says, resigned. “All right. That’s fair enough.”

Nods all around.

When the ladder creaks again, there’s no surprise to be had. Gwen appears, bleary and puffy-eyed from sleep, wearing an NYU sweatshirt so comically oversized it falls down to her knees. Miles runs a quick risk analysis and settles on ‘no comment.’

“You’re all terrible at stealth,” she says. She crawls across the roof and slumps down on the other side of Miles, bracing her chin on one knee. “It’s a miracle you haven’t been caught.”

“Did we wake you up?”

“No.” The jaw-splitting yawn that follows immediately unmasks this for a lie.

“Sorry,” Miles says guiltily.

“S’okay.”

“You can go back to bed. We’ll be quiet.”

“No, you won’t.”

“I would.”

“You would _try_.” She slumps against his shoulder in a way that suggests her spine is a non-Newtonian fluid. Miles struggles to not react to this and fails.

Gwen Stacy gets cuddly when she’s sleepy. Miles takes this information, carefully packages it, and slides it into a highly important folder occupying a revered and unchanging place at the back of his mind.

“If you fall asleep up here, your neck is going to feel like hell in the morning,” Peter warns.

“S’okay.”

“Gwen.”

“Uh huh.”

“That’s sleepy Gwen talking. Don’t listen to sleepy Gwen. Sleepy Gwen is the devil. Morning Gwen is a very different person, and she will kick my ass for letting her get a crick in her neck.”

“Fuck morning Gwen,” she mutters. 

“Gwen!” Peter puts his hands on his hips, his lips trembling with the effort of not laughing. “You apologize to Miles right this instant.”

“Nnf. Sorry, Miles.”

“I don’t know why me,” Miles says pointedly. “I go to school. I use the Internet. I’m on Twitter—”

“Yes, but you have a pure heart.” 

“So? What does that have to do with saying f—”

“Shhh,” Gwen interrupts. “Let us have this.”

Miles flicks her nose. She wrinkles it, but otherwise doesn’t object. “You’re ridiculous people.”

“You say that like we don’t know.”

Miles jostles her, and she jostles him back. Peter yawns again, settling into place. Noir and Ham and Peni are either already asleep or pretending to be, contorted in varyingly comfortable positions that will all assuredly give them cricks in their necks.

Miles doesn’t close his eyes. He’s worried — he knows — that if he does, the nightmare will come back, and it’s too nice a night for that. 

(It probably will, anyway. Someday he’ll have to deal with that. Sometimes he worries he’s still going to be having that nightmare when he’s as old as Peter, and there’s nothing about Peter that exactly reassures him otherwise.)

And still, he thinks, even despite that, maybe this is allowed to happen. That things like this can exist — that there can be good days, long days full of sunshine, when not a single bad thing happens: when food is good, and the music is loud, and everything falls into perfect order like notes on a chord. Nights when all the others are within arms’ reach, being there, knowing what he needs without having to ask. It’s allowed. He gets to have this. This is his.

**Author's Note:**

> Obligatory nudge towards the [ULTIMATE OFFICIAL SPIDER-PERSON ROAD TRIP MIXTAPE,](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6wJ1eRm9xeC2o88wBfMKfK) a fic playlist curated specially for you by Spider-Man himself (and herself, and herself, and himself, and himself, and himself).


End file.
